Smell It?

In the olden days I baked all our bread - since the kids were little. Then we renovated our kitchen into this wonderful place to cook and I couldn't make a loaf of bread. They always looked promising till they went into the oven then they fell. I tried different yeast, water, flour and recipes for at least three years and always had the same result, BRICKS. I gave up.

I got an very easy recipe for a wonderful crunchy crust bread from a friend last year and I was in business again. It is a beautiful, tasty loaf of bread but it is white so not an everyday bread for us. The bakery we have been buying our favorite bread at changed the recipe recently - how dare they - and we didn't like the new version nearly as much. Why do people think whole wheat bread has to be sweet? I wasn't happy paying $6.10 for a loaf of bread we didn't like so I decided to give it another try.

I pulled out  my ancient copy of The Tassahara Bread Book and dove in. It is made using the sponge method which I probably hadn't done in 30 years but since I was trying it at altitude (none of my 6 bread cookbooks talked about altitude) I decided to give it an edge. I also decided to add bulgar to the dough (very brave to improvise the first time). I want to reproduce the texture of the multi-grain bread from the Seven Star Bakery in Providence. The dough looked promising every step of the way but I wasn't going to get too excited about it till I pulled it out of the oven. Low and behold IT WORKED! It looks beautiful and tastes yummy - not sweet. The crumb isn't quite where I want it to be but I'm getting there and I just had the BEST piece of toast....