This time for our breads, we were given the assignments of Avocado-Guacamole Bread and Pesto Pine Nut Bread.
When I first got the book, the avocado-guacamole bread caught my eye right away. I love avocado and wanted to give this bread a try. It was the first or second bread I made from Healthy Breads in Five. I'm just going to work from memory on this one because I didn't make the dough again for the group. I thought the bread was pretty tasty myself and liked the chunks of tomato that you could see when you sliced into the bread. The kids didn't like this bread, and Paul was pretty lukewarm about it as I recall. I tried freezing part of the dough to make a loaf another time from it, but I think the veggies didn't appreciate being frozen. It turned very weepy when I defrosted it and made a very flat, unappetizing loaf. I know some of the doughs say that you can freeze them and use later and this didn't happen to be one of the recipes that said that, so I should have paid more attention there. I suppose I would have been better off baking the dough and freezing the loaf. A whole batch of this dough was more than our family could really get through.
Our family loves the flavors in pesto, so I decided to make a whole batch of the pesto pine nut bread. When Ivy saw the jar of pesto, she wanted to know when we were having pesto and was disappointed that I was using it for bread. And the pine nuts barely made it to the bread since someone who will remain unnamed decided to snarf down a good deal of the bag without asking permission.
(His name starts with P...) So I was working with slightly less than 1/2 a cup of pine nuts, but I figured it wouldn't be a huge difference. I also used more wheat flour than the recipe called for and less all purpose flour. I had the spelt flour from the beet rolls and used it and about 3.5 cups of fresh-milled wheat flour and about 1.5 cups of a.p. flour. I mixed the dough this afternoon and decided I would make a loaf from the unrefrigerated dough since it seems to give a better rise for me most of the time. It was pretty sticky to work with and when I shaped the first loaf, I decided we'd probably need two loaves, so I made another one, too. The house smelled delicious while they baked.
I wanted to serve the bread with fresh mozzarella and turkey burgers. I still don't know where I went wrong with the mozzarella, but it didn't come together like it should have. I wasn't paying attention when I started the mozzarella and was working from a different recipe than I normally use. It was more like a ricotta texture when I was done, and I couldn't stretch it at all like mozzarella is supposed to because it just was a gloppy mess. I still scooped a bit of the cheese onto my burger and popped it under the broiler. It didn't taste bad, just not what was expected. I was a bit annoyed to waste a gallon of milk on that. I know that the expression "Don't cry over spilled milk" originated with reference to someone who did their own milking because it's just more disappointing to waste the milk when you actually put in the labor to get it!
Despite the disappointing turnout of the cheese, we had the bread for dinner with turkey burgers still. Paul and Ivy both said the bread was good. As they didn't really care for the veggie side I made with dinner, I guess the bread was the best part of the meal. Didn't garner any raves this time around like the olive oil bread did. I'm going to use the leftover bread to make pizza, I think. Although this was a tasty bread, I think I would probably just go for a plain loaf and put the pesto on the pasta next time. Plus pine nuts are a little pricey to do very often. (As a side note, when I make pesto, I've found that walnuts are a very tasty and much less costly substitute for pine nuts.)
You can see what others did with this dough by visiting the
HBin5 Bread Braid hosted at
Big Black Dog.
Posts
