Hey all!
Here's a super quick post from my iPad.
My adventures in Colorado have kept me quite busy but I'm still enjoying my kitchen and crochet. I've mastered the art of fine Artisan Bread and have been experimenting with lots of different flavors, like a White Chocolate Cranberry Almond, and everyone's favorite, Garlic Cheddar. I found the recipe here at Simply So Good, and couldn't believe how easy it is to follow. Seriously, the bread is {FOOL} Proof! If you follow the instructions, it would be impossible to mess this up. Heck, at one point I realized I was cutting the recipe in half, but continued adding the full amount of water (? uh.....no explanation there) and the bread was STILL amazing!
If you don't have 12-18 hrs to let something rise, just add a little more yeast. Doubling the yeast rises the bread in about half the time - and here in the High Altitude, everything rises much more quickly anyway.
If I am in a hurry - I can usually start the baking process after 4 hrs rise time.
I don't own an enamel covered cast iron dutch oven, however my regular ones do the job just fine. The two smaller loaves were the recipe cut in half, the larger loaf is one regular recipe. We are a small family though, so we don't need too much bread. I bake it twice a week, and often make extra to give away. The loaves cost me anywhere from 75 cents to $1.00 so they are totally worth the time and effort.
Got any flavor ideas to share with me?
You can follow my Bread Recipe Board here . I seriously have over 200 pins just for bread recipes alone. Tortillas, Indian Flaan, Artisan, white bread, whole wheat bread, rolls, croissants, garlic cheesy bread, you name it, I've collected it.
Last night my son reminded me of a yummy appetizer we had at Old Chicago a few months back. It was a fried dough with cheddar beer dipping sauce. We decided to try and recreate it at home - and so off to Pinterest I went. (and the liquor store, who knew there were so many kinds??)
I found a couple dough recipes but only one cheddar beer sauce so we chose a Pizza dough and gathered the ingredients for the sauce.
We LOVED the dough recipe. Seriously, I didn't have any honey so I used raw sugar as a replacement and it was amazing! Amazing... deep fried and YUMMM. The sauce we felt was lacking something. It was good, but maybe we chose the wrong beer, didn't add enough Worcestershire sauce, or maybe we did something wrong with the cheese. Either way we're sure it's NOT the original recipe's fault - but we are definitely going to use it as a guide and tweak it to our tastes in the future. I'd say start with this one and go from there.
Anyway - you can find these recipes and many more by following me on Pinterest at sunflowergal74 :)
Thanks to these websites for the yummy recipes, and for sharing your heart and food on the net for the rest of us to find!
www.simplysogood.com
www.thekitchn.com
Happy New Year!!!
~Kisha
