All grains contain peptides that mimic morphine or endogenous opioid substances. This is where I deal with my latest loaf craving. Get your bread-based exorphin fix here.

What is my Everyday Bread?

Give us this day our daily bread,
And deliver us from evil.

Although I'm working my way through Reinhart's 'Whole Grain Breads' book, I oftentimes will just need a quick loaf to use to take with me to work, and I don't have enough time to do the 2-day prep work that most of Reinhart's loaves need.  I also have Reinhart's 'Bread Baker's Apprentice' and my sourdough comes from a period of time when I was using this book to get it going.  I still dip into the latter book occasionally in this blog site, for one reason or another, and sometimes this ends up in the 'Everyday Bread' section.



I still use some recipes from the people who brought us 'Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day' and 'Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day' -- and rarely I will dip into the very similar recipes in Fertig's book, '200 Fast & Easy Artisan Breads'. Although, I tend to tweak all of their recipes a bit to include some of my wild yeast starters.  I like to try different things.  Everything I do seems to be an experiment.

When you experiment, you get a lot of failures.  A lot of my everyday bread is quite ugly.  I'll generally eat it anyway.  With Thanks.


After baking the Easter Bread, I realized we have a book that has a few breads in it I'd like to try.  This is 'Best of Baking' by Annette Wolter and Christian Teubner.  I guess it's been around so long, I forgot it was there.  But the pictures are nice, and although the book doesn't go into a lot of detail about shaping the loaves, they look terrific.
This is a new book for me:  'Great Whole Grain Breads' by Beatrice Ojakangas.  There are tons of recipes in it, but I'm mostly interested in the whole grain recipes -- and despite the name of the book, there really aren't that many recipes of that nature (most recipes use some all purpose, bread, or high-gluten flours).  Still, there may be the odd other bread from this book that I will try for my Everyday Bread.  I like the name of the ' Hätäleipä ' or 'Emergency Bread', for example.  That may come in handy, and is sort of what my Everyday Bread is all about: Bread that you can make in a jiff.  So far I've only made the 100% rye bread from this book:



I've now got Jim Lahey's book, 'my bread', and I recently aquired a cast iron Dutch oven to try out some of the recipes in it.  But the cast iron Dutch oven isn't entirely necessary: even before I got it, I was using Lahey's methods with the inside ceramic of an old worn out crock pot, and various casserole dishes.  None of his breads are 100% whole grain, but I've experimented with and continue to experiment with adding more whole grains to his recipes.



The Cast Iron Dutch Oven I got is great fun to use while camping, or in the barbecue, and this winter I want to try it in our woodfire fireplace insert, for baking bread.

I recently got in the mail Jeffrey Hamelman's 'Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes'.  All the serious bread blog sites in the U.S. are devoted to it and seem to love it.  I am only just starting to dip into this book.  Although I haven't made a lot of bread with it, I've learned a lot from reading it.

Every recipe has the recipe scaled for large bakeries, and for smaller home users (as well as giving the baker's percentages, so you can scale it further easily enough).  My one complaint is that the home measurements are in ounces, not grams (but the bakery measurements are in kilograms), so I'll have to do some extra work for each recipe I try.  But I bet that before long I'll be using some of the recipes in this book.

I just found an old classic in a used book store that I'm sure will come in handy: James Beard's Beard on Bread .  This 1973 book is a classic.  I'm certain that I'll get some use out of this one.  His recipes use yeast, even the so-called 'sourdough' breads (except perhaps for the Finnish Loaf), but Beard forecast the return to home and artisan bread making way ahead of his time.


In the course of my Internet surfing I came across Nils Schöner's blog, "Ye Olde Bread Blogge", and became a frequent visitor.  Although the site is not updated frequently, the quality of the breads is without par.  That is just the reverse of my blog (where the site is updated constantly, but the quality of the loaves is low).  Nils finally organized his thoughts and his recipes into a very nice e-book (for now, freely downloadable) [If the link is broken, I guess Nils decided to remove it from his site].  The range of German breads in this book is truly inspiring, and I know I'll be trying out a lot of recipes in this book.  It is now available as a Kindle E-book too.



Here is another book (3 books, actually, this is a ton of information!) that is currently freely downloadable: Northwest Sourdough's ebook "Discovering Sourdough".  I haven't baked anything from these books yet, but I've glanced through.  Most of the recipes involve bread flour or white flour or all-purpose flour.  Even some of the whole wheat recipes involve sifting out the bran.  But no doubt I'll be looking at this series of bread books in the future, and if I use anything in it, I will be donating.  Teresa L. Hosier Greenway is obviously a person who knows her sourdough and needs to be encouraged to keep sharing.  From a book for Beginners, through Intermediate recipes, to Advanced Sourdough techniques, these books could take a person several years to bake through.  I can't imagine how long it took to write.  Amazing bit of work.



I bought these next three books at the same time.  The first two are both about whole grain breads.  They have nothing else in common.  I might be dipping into either one of them, at any moment, for inspiration.

The last book is all about me and my garden: can I begin to grow my own grains?

I found this book in a bookstore when I shouldn't have been looking for more bread books.  It is wonderful, and I count it among the very best whole grain cookbooks for baking.  I suspect that I will be baking every single recipe in this little book, before I'm through.


Readers of this blog, perhaps tired of the way I was obviously flopping around looking for something that other recipe books could never provide, convinced me to try the recipes in Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson.  I was reluctant because there are few recipes in it that involve whole grains.  Nevertheless, I have not been disappointed, and by far my favourite everyday bread is now a whole wheat wild yeast Tartine Bread, with a tiny bit of rye included.  Experimenting with the percentages of grains and water is extremely enjoyable and I have even started baking bread for some of my friends and family.


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The last thing I probably need is another bread book.  But one thing leads to the next, and in the course of my bumblings, ramblings, and rumblings, I happen upon the mention of several other books that look interesting.  Some are on bread; some are on using whole grains in the diet (not necessarily bread or baking); some are on bread science; some are on wood-fired ovens; and some are on growing grain.  So here is the short list of the next books I'd like to read/get/collect/use:


And here are even a few others that didn't quite make my short list (yet):













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