Pain d'Epi (wheat stalk bread)

Since my recent obsession is baking bread, I thought it only fitting that the first blog be about baking bread.  

Last night Kyla wanted to make Curried Kumara Soup for dinner, so here was a perfect opportunity to use some of the dough sitting in the fridge to make nice bread to go with it.  It was also raining and very cold, so there wasn't really much to do.I had previously tried this particular form of bread, with limited success.  The first attempt was using stored dough again, but it must have been slightly too wet for this, as although they tasted great, the wheatstalks looked more like caterpillars. (Craig and Sandra can vouch for this.)  So, time to try again.

This time I put a lot more flour around the dough when shaping it ("cloaking" according to the book I have), and let it rise for a couple of hours while doing other stuff.  I then dusted with a bit more flour, and cut to shape the dough.

Here it is just before going into the oven.

And after 25 minutes baking, 

it looked like this:

The kids were very impressed, and between the four of us (Daryl being in London at present) we managed to get through almost all of 2 of these.  They were very tasty and nothing at all like small segmented larvae.

I believe Paul was going to try the brioche recipe from the same book/website (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day) so I am sure we will hear/see about that.  It looks very yummy but the quantity of eggs and butter used to make it so rich is just a little off-putting.  I guess for the sake of learning we will have to put ourselves through the ordeal of testing it anyway.  

I am thinking Blueberry and cinnamon brioche? mmmmmm.