Yeast adventures

I don't bake a lot of bread or yeast doughs, because I don't eat a lot of bread qua bread. But I almost always have some homemade whole wheat in the freezer, and because I'm only using up my five-pound bag of rye flour in quarter-cup increments, and because I had a hankerin' for something chewy and full of caraway seeds, I pulled out the ole trusty pumpernickel recipe. I gave it three risings. The first for about 2 hours, the second for another 2 hours, and the third for about 90 minutes. By that time, it was getting close to bedtime, so despite the dough looking maybe 10% larger despite more than 5 hours of rising in a warm place, I baked it.

It is bread. And it is chewy and laced with caraway seeds. But it's also dense as, dense as, my similes have abandoned me. It's a hard dense loaf, tasty but heavy. I made grilled cheese sandwiches with it for lunch. Thin slices of pumpernickel and Gruyere cheese on the George Foreman grill. It wasn't bad, but I think this loaf is better suited to eating with soup. I must have killed the yeast at some point.

Just so you know

This is how we do chocolate chip cookies around here.

Step 1: make dough.


Step 2: spoon out one cookie sheet's worth of dough. Bake.


Step 3: divide remaining dough into two portions. Put each portion into ziploc bag. Freeze.

Mmmmmmmm. Looks gloppy!

Just so you know, and not for any reason or anything, but these are the official chocolate chip cookie of people who don't really care whether or not the Redskins win today and thus will not be grossly disappointed if they lose because everyone knows the real show is Brett Fav-ruh next week.




Hey Bunny! When're you coming back to the sofa? Game's started!