What a day again! In incredibly hot weather (and the lab isn’t air-conditioned) we baked millet bread, corn bread, 100% whole wheat bread, oatmeal pan bread and flax seeds bread. I particularly adored the millet bread. Very easy to make and extremely tasty and light. Didier said that it is a good bread to bake for a restaurant as it can be sliced and put in a bread basket where it adds a beautiful touch of yellow offsetting the brown of other breads’ crusts.
Of course it has been very hot these past two days and the whole grain flours we are using are pretty thirsty to begin with but still I have a feeling that “more water” is Didier’s mantra and when I see him add one or two cups full of water to a dough that looks perfectly hydrated to me and when I see the dough absorb the water and become all the better for it, I tell myself that I have much to learn – which is why I am at SFBI this week. 🙂
Anyway Steve B. requested more info on the shaping of the pear buckwheat bread and since the corn bread we made today got shaped in exactly the same way as the pear buckwheat (at least right to the point when it was ready to get into the oven), I took a few pictures along the way. I hope they will be descriptive enough. If you still have questions, please let me know.
Like the corn bread, the pear buckwheat bread is pre-shaped into a tight ball, then it rests 20 to 25 minutes (longer of course if the room temperature is cold). It then gets flattened into a disk.