Category Archives: Yeast Breads

Week Five: Breads for Parties I think there is no more versatile or indispensable food you can have for a party than a trusty baguette.  Whether you’re toasting slivers for elegant canapés or bruschetta, serving slices alongside a rustic cheese … Continue reading →

Week Three: Breakfast Breads

Oh, the bagel. Where would our nation-wide breakfast buffets be without you? Sliced in half, arranged in neat rows between the heavy-yet-somehow-insubstantial blueberry muffins and the icing-coated flat danishes of various coagulated fillings. If you’re lucky, there may be a toaster conveniently nearby, maybe next to the iced-down bowls of single-serving cream cheese and the always inadequate plastic knives. Even if they’ve gone a bit stale, you’re still best off with the bagel. This is part of the reason I don’t like breakfast buffets. (The other part: they’re so early!)

The name bagel is from the Yiddish word “beygl”, from Old High German “boug”, which means “ring”…. Continue reading →

Week Three: Breakfast Breads I don’t know about you, but after the glorious culinary abandon of the holiday season (I’m talking all the way back to Thanksgiving, people), my January is leaving me with a recurring desire to eat nothing … Continue reading →

Week Three: Breakfast Breads I finished out last week with a series of recipes centered around a theme: similar ingredients, similar procedure, different end result.  And, once I thought up a theme, my mind went into overdrive and came up … Continue reading →

This is the last bread in the series, but I think it’s my favorite.  It uses the same basic ingredients and procedure, but through different timing and shaping, it becomes a completely different end product.  Ok, so there is some … Continue reading →

Looking around my kitchen yesterday, bread pans, bench scraper, and bowls sitting on the drying rack, flour seeping slowly into the every nook and cranny, freezer increasingly full of various foil-wrapped loaves, I realized that my apartment is becoming a … Continue reading →

The third loaf in this series has nearly the same ingredients as the previous two: flour, water, salt, and yeast.  But where the French bread had honey and butter for additional flavor, this uses only a splash of milk.  And, … Continue reading →

Since I gave such a thorough discussion of the bread-making process yesterday, I thought I’d finish out the week with variations on that theme.  Which is to say: breads with similar recipes and procedures, but with very different outcomes, based … Continue reading →

This is a fairly generic bread recipe that falls under the broad category of “French bread”.  The term “French bread” can describe any number of moderately crusty, varyingly airy, white breads; but the main feature is that they are usually … Continue reading →