One of the things I did over the holidays was try new recipes.
I tried a lot of new recipes over the past month.
Most of the recipes I found by flipping through my (multiple) baking cookbooks and looking for things I thought I (or everyone else) would like. But after making pumpkin walnut bread (very delicious–I’m eating part of the third loaf I made as I type) I decided I wanted some cranberry walnut bread.
Now this is a bit of a problem, because Grandmom can’t have nuts or cranberries, which means that if I make baked goods with those ingredients, she can’t have any. But as I also made challah and Italian bread, I figured Grandmom could just suffer, because I really wanted cranberry walnut bread.
Knowing precisely what I wanted, I started going through my cookbooks.
And I kept coming up short. I found a couple recipes for cranberry walnut quick breads, but I wanted a yeast bread, and not one of my cookbooks had anything close.
So I then googled, and discovered that Rose Levy Beranbaum has a blog, and on that blog she had a recipe for cranberry walnut bread (made with yeast).
I glanced at the recipe, then continued looking. I mean, that is a VERY long recipe. But, I couldn’t find anything else that looked like what I wanted, so I printed out the recipe and decided to try it.
I have to admit she uses a layout for her recipes I don’t particularly like–she lists the ingredients as they are added. Yes, that forces me to read through everything before starting, but I like to do my mis en place before starting to make sure I have everything I need, and I prefer having everything I need on a single page.
Be that as it may, I started the recipe and then discovered I did not have a back-up container of bread flour. Two bags of white wheat, plenty of all purpose, but no bags of bread flour. So I had to sub all purpose for much of the recipe.
Despite my lack of proper ingredients (I also don’t have malt powder [because I don’t like malt]) the bread turned out extremely well–in fact, I ended up making the recipe again (the second time with bread flour).
The only thing I didn’t like, is this recipe makes a humongous loaf. The second time around I made two loaves, and put one loaf in the freezer, because that is a LOT of bread, especially if there are only two people eating the bread.
