Bread, glorious bread! Doesn’t it make you want to sing and exalt and throw a gluten-full party as we delve further into bread baking experiments? Think about this: whole wheat-sourdough-cinnamon raisin bread with a decadent cream cheese topping. Or cinnamon raisin bread with cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top, or a smear of peanut butter.
Who doesn’t love these things? A hallmark of childhood is the cinnamon-sugar toast my mom used to make for us when we were sick, and finally ready to eat real foods again. So this bread is nostalgic, it’s hearty, it’s dense, and offers hints of fall and winter, when we want everything to be cinnamon and nutmeg and warm apple pie or a mug of hot cider. Yes, yes, please.
I’m continuing Josey Baker Bread experiments and am having such FUN, which, I think was his intent (I dig it). Bread baking has always had an air of the scary — like there was too much science involved or epic room for error. But really, the only tools you need are patience and a willingness to be attentive to the dough; to notice the subtleties during each phase and think about what modifications you’d make next time.
Young bread, ready for stretching and shaping
The patience part is good practice for me, since I’m the kind of person who discovers a recipe that looks amazing and has to bake it RIGHT NOW right now right now. And I usually can’t think of much else until I do.
Most of his recipes involve rounds of stretching and kneading across half-hour intervals, so it’s stretch-knead-wait a half-hour a total of four times before getting to the bulk-rise phase of the recipe.
I still need practice in shaping my loaves. These two turned out especially dense, with the bread baked in the loaf pan not even filling the pan entirely. It’s a lesson to me to spend more time stretching during the shaping phase, for a more evenly sized loaf.
Mr. Baker calls for Thompson raisins, though I used a mix of flame and Thompson, sea salt, cinnamon, and whole wheat flour. His recipe calls for a very small amount of sourdough starter, and I added approx. a teaspoon more than recommended since I wanted this to be a noticeably sour loaf.
Next up in gluten tales, diving into an everything loaf coated with poppyseed and sesame.
May: that glorious month in the Bay Area — the first burst of summer bringing sunshine, blossoms, stone fruit, and a thousand ideas of what to bake, preserve, and just plain gobble with peaches, and cherries, and strawberries at every turn. California is pressing forth in the wake of a drought and very little rain the last two years, so we’ll feel the scarcity of summer fruits later this season, I’d wager, and are already witnessing the price increases per pound of these beauties. In the meantime, your May Short List (in June), posthaste. 
1. The season’s first cherries. And a quiet Saturday evening sitting on the stoop with my partner, sharing ginger beer and lager and spitting cherry pits across the driveway into a garden bed. The simplicity of it and our easy happiness all spelled L-O-V-E. 
2. Homemade churros! Nick’s sister had the ingenious idea to bring these to a work party, and it was the first time I’ve ever deep fried anything in my kitchen. Amazingly, it was simple! Dan used a pastry bag to pipe dough into the pan of oil, and before long we had piles of 
3. Fresh strawberry ice cream. And, um, overflowing the ice cream maker and being forced to eat the overfill right away…which, really wasn’t the problem I thought it would be. I added both lemon and lime to my blend of heavy cream and milk and sugar before adding it to the ice cream maker, and it created a very bright flavor. 
4. Several rounds of Adventure Bread. A delicious, dense, gluten-free loaf from Josey Baker Bread, it’s packed with seeds and nuts, all toasted to lend a beautiful earthy flavor. This bread is reminiscent of the European-style loaf from Trader Joe’s, except it’s 1000x yummier. So far, we’ve used almonds, sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin seeds, and I expect each incarnation of this loaf to become even more experimental. 
Town Bakes 