Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes A Day "Master Dough"

I'm excited about my twice a month baking challenge with the "Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" baking group. I just love the people in this group! Really fun and creative. Everyone is helpful, giving tips that make our baking easier and even more fun. The group is sponsored by Michelle of BigBlackDogs. Michelle has set it up so we can see what the other people in the group have done. If you want to check those out, just click on her link.

This is the first official challenge of the group--baking the signature whole wheat bread recipe from the book. Then we bake two other recipes with the same dough.

Here is what I made:

• Two whole wheat "master dough" loaves:

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I had promised my wonderful yoga teacher some whole wheat bread. I made her one whole wheat bread on my baking stone.

Also, I have a lot of garlic; she loves garlic. I was doing a lot of baking in one evening, and didn't want to spend a lot of time on any of the recipes. There's a garlic studded baguette recipe in the book, but I didn't have the time to roll out the dough, form a baguette, and do extra steps.

Therefore, I just peeled the garlic and cut the cloves in half. After scoring the loaves I pressed the garlic into the scores. The garlic seemed to roast as the loaf baked. It smelled wonderful, even the next morning!

My yoga instructor was very excited to see the garlic loaf. Since I picked up a lot of garlic at Sam's Club, she asked if I could make another garlic loaf with chopped up garlic in the loaf also. She wants to enjoy her bread with plain tomato soup!




Turkish Pita Bread with Black Sesame Seeds! :

YAAY, I finally get to use those black sesame seeds I shlepped from Los Angeles on my last trip! I bought them for a bbq pita recipe that I saw. By the time I got the seeds home, it was past bbq weather!

This was easy to make.

We felt this was ok. We like the regular white flour pita bread better. I guess it is what is familiar to us.

Spicy Whole Grain "Pillows":




Ok, these were supposed to be crackers. This way my first time trying to make crackers. I had a tough time cutting them, I didn't have access to a pizza cutter at the time. I rolled the knife across, and the dough just stuck together. I was late finishing up before dinner, and I guess I didn't dock them enough. If I do this again, I would use my egg slicer gadget to poke holes in the dough. A way of repurposing a gadget I haven't used in a long time!

Moving the separate squares of dough to the cookie sheet wasn't easy either. Very time consuming. I'll look for easier ways to do this, because my husband LOVED them!

He liked the pillows when they first came out of the oven. Two days later, they were hard and he didn't care for them.

I have to also say thanks to Zoe and Jeff, the authors of "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" and "Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day." They patiently answered all my questions over the last year--and there were many! They enabled me to bake wonderful breads, and try new things.