Bread Bakeathon #9, #10 and #11

This blog should be sub-titled 'end of the second chapter of the River Cottage Bread Book'. I've baked the Basic Loaf and now I have baked everything in the Variations on the basic bread recipe chapter.

The final three included monstery bread (heavy with oats) and hazel maizel bread, a lovely concoction involving maize meal, apple juice and nuts which made for lovely crusty brown rolls - both of which I forgot to photograph (but they just looked like brown rolls).

The last bread in the chapter was Empty-the-shelf bread, the opportunity to use up tail-ends of whatever bags of flour are to hand and anything else that might be leftover, like nuts or muesli (but Daniel Stevens advises against empty-the-Hoover-bag bread...)

My Empty-the-shelf bread included maize meal and apple juice from the previous bread, a handful of wholemeal flour, white flour, a handful of porridge oats, walnuts and sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds with a bit of walnut oil for luck.

I was bored with rolls by this point (and had been watching Lorraine Pascale's Home Cooking Made Easy on BBC2) so when it came to shaping we got a pain d'epi (at the front) and a fougasse. The latter is a lovely shape for tearing and sharing with a bowl of soup and is a shape I think I'll be making a lot in the future. It bakes well too and gives lots of lovely crust.

So having baked all the basics (and I think my bread has improved in the process) we now head off into the realms of 'Beyond the basic loaf'. This promises such delights as focaccia, ciabatta, brioche, bagels, muffins and pizza, all of which I have cooked before, but also includes Vetkoek (which are deep fried. I NEVER deep fry!) and barbecue breads at not really a barbecuing time of year. This should be interesting!