HBinFive: Carrot Bread and Olive Spelt Bread

This time around our HBin5 mission were two breads with veggies included-carrot bread and olive spelt bread. I still have spelt flour hanging around from the red beet buns, so I knew I was going to be making the  olive spelt one. And the carrot bread sounded tasty as well, so I got on board with both breads. 

I only made half a recipe of the carrot bread because I wasn't sure how the family would like it and I didn't want to put myself through the temptation of having to finish it all myself! The carrot bread calls for dried fruit to be added, so I used dates and apples. I had read several comments that the included coconut didn't show up strongly in the finished product, so I doubled the amount called for, and while it could be detected, it was still pretty light in coconut flavor. I also used all freshly milled white wheat flour for this bread instead of half wheat and half all-purpose. I wanted to make mine into a braid, so I refrigerated the dough before using it. I used half to form a braid and put the other half into some muffin pans I have with heart designs on the bottom. I wasn't impressed with how the breads looked after baking--they were definitely not the prettiest breads I have made. The braid turned out flat-looking, and the muffins didn't really show the designs from the bottom of the pan well. I decided to use the cream cheese honey cream cheese icing to top the breads with and the icing hid all the unprettiness, and they turned out looking fairly appetizing after all. Everyone said they tasted good, and I really liked this bread. The icing topping was pretty tasty as well. I read several comments from others who baked this bread and said it wasn't very sweet, but you couldn't tell with the icing.

I wasn't sure what kind of olives to get for my olive spelt bread, but found a jar of assorted olives marinated in some kind of wine and herbs combination. Unfortunately for me, the olives weren't pitted and let's just say, it takes quite a while pit a jar of olives! I had fresh yogurt from our goats' milk to use for this dough. I had the spelt flour, as I said, but again instead of using all-purpose flour, I just used some of my own flour ground from the white winter wheat. It's a lot lighter than whole wheat along the lines of the white wheat flour. I thought this dough sounded like a great base for a pizza, so I used about a fourth of it for making a pizza for lunch the other day. I topped it with pizza sauce, mozzarella, and turkey pepperoni. It was a bit hard to roll out because of the olives in the dough and I kept ripping holes in the crust, but managed to pinch it all together. Paul and I enjoyed it, and I loved the mix of olives in the dough. Ivy commented on why I couldn't just make something normal, but this didn't stop her from eating more pizza than either Paul or I did! She just said it would have been better without the olives. I still have some of this dough left and think I will probably wind up with a couple more pizzas from it, but think I might make a little round loaf from it to really see how the bread tastes on its own. If I make this one again, I'm definitely going with pitted olives!! (And I didn't get a picture of the pizza, because we really all were pretty hungry when it came out of the oven, but it looked pretty tasty--you'll have to trust me on that one!)

As there has been some discussion in the HBin5 group about making yogurt, I wanted to comment a little about it. I started making yogurt before we were getting milk from our goats, but now I make our yogurt from our own fresh milk and it's so tasty! I started out with just making it by adding a couple bottles of hot water wrapped in towels to the cooler with the warm innoculated milk and leaving it in the cooler all day to set up, but this year I bought a yogurt maker  (here) and I love how easy it makes the incubation period of the yogurt making. You still have to heat your milk and let it cool off before you add your yogurt in. But once it is ready, you can just put your containers right into the yogurt maker and let it keep your milk at the right temperature until it is yogurt. It's not a necessity for making yogurt, but it sure makes things easier. My yogurt maker came with 7 little cups for making individual servings of yogurt and a lid that fits over the little cups, but it also came with a tall lid that lets you use larger containers in your maker. I usually make two quart jars of yogurt at a time, but it could easily fit three and maybe four, I just haven't tried that many. This latest time that I made yogurt, I made a quart of plain to have some to use in my bread and a quart of strawberry. I hadn't added fruit to the yogurt before incubating it before, but the booklet with my maker had a few recipes to try. You have to cook the fruit first before adding it to the milk, and you add some sugar to the fruit while it cooks. All the fruit sank to the bottom while the yogurt incubated, but I strained the yogurt when it was done to make it a little thicker and creamier and then stirred the fruit through the yogurt, and it was so yummy! I'm looking forward to trying other flavors of fruit yogurts now that I saw how well that turned out.

You can check out what others did with these doughs by visiting the HBin5 Bread Braid hosted at Big Black Dog.