madbaker | Cooking, Good and Bad

The Good: I tried a new recipe for New Yawk-style rye bread from a baking cookbook I picked up semi-recently. The recipe was slightly involved, and took much time (although not much effort - lots of "knead for five minutes, let rise for an hour"). I took the loaf out at 9:30 last night, which is way past my bedtime.

Still, it came out all right. Nice and light, which is slightly odd for rye, but good that all the rising time paid off. It tasted a bit dry this AM when I carved a small piece, but that was easily remedied by a bit of butter. I made a ham sandwich for lunch today; that will be the real test.

The best part: it looked fabulous. I used a willow rising basket, and it came out beautifully round, with a light dusting of flour in a concentric ring pattern. My wife said it looked "professional", and then hastily added "not that your normal loaves don't look good, er..." (I wasn't offended, in fact thinking much the same.)

The Bad: had to clean out the cupboard, because a bag of wild rice became infested with some small beetle-oid. Icky. Had to throw out a bunch of things and I need to buy some more springlock jars so that even when this happens again, it won't spread so easily. At least the trash pickup was today, so we didn't have to think about having infested trash cans...