Green “Popeye” Bread

Most adventures start out with one foot in ‘desperation’.  My desperation comes in the form of having a gigantic bag of spinach in the fridge that’s about to go bad.

Can you add spinach to bread? Earlier this week I tried, with very poor results. OK, I tried adding spinach and the bitter cooking water to 50% whole wheat bread. The results were less than stellar. Bitter, dry, and not very green.

This morning, facing the same bag of spinach, now definitely on its very last legs, I decided to try green bread again.

Spinach 1

I start with my favourite rich and light and bright and eggy bread (Challah).  I steam a whack of spinach (200 g), let it cool, and then squish the water out.

Spinach 2

Spinach 3

Spinach 4

spinach.4

And that’s how “Popeye” Bread was born …

spinach.final

Sweet and light.  Can’t taste the spinach.  Hey kids, eat your greens! This is going to be great breakfast toast …

:) All best, Shelley

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Raisin Yeast Water (Part 2)

Read Part 1 here.

So nothing much happens for a couple of days. You stir every few hours, as you remember, and by the end of the third day it’s looking like this:

Raisin Yeast Water (day 3)

Then you go to bed, and wake up on day 4, and in the morning it’s like magic angels have played with your jar overnight.

Because now the raisins are FLOATING. And there are little bubbles around them. If you put your ear close to the jar, it sounds like a glass of pop (like coke or pepsi!).

Raisin Yeast Water Day 4 (floating)

Can you see the bubbles?

So next up, we check the water to make SURE it’s strong enough to make bread.  That’ll be in Part 3.

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Raisin Yeast Water (Part 1)

January 28, 2012

So it turns out that you can grow yeast that’s strong enough to make bread out of raisins. I kid you not. Once I saw this picture online, I knew I had to figure out how to do it. My first attempt didn’t go very well.  Neither did my second, third or fourth. I either [...]

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Raisins

October 11, 2011

I was thinking today about raisins. In Paris, they can be pretty expensive at the regular grocery store (Monoprix), and sometimes they’re hard to find. The raisins that I use for Paris Bread come from a great Lebanese store in the 15th, and they even stock different KINDS of raisins. For example, for my Raisin [...]

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Freezing Bread

September 12, 2011

I’ve been doing lots of test baking over the past month or so, while perfecting the recipes for the Bakery. Because I have a small family of two, we can’t eat an entire loaf of bread before it goes stale. I also admit that I get bored of one flavour after a few days, so [...]

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Butter or Margarine

September 1, 2011

The butter in Paris is pretty yummy. Lots of variety in flavours, you can get no-salt, demi-salt, crunchy-salt, and just about everything in between. But for baking, do you want to use margarine or butter? For the Paris Bread Co. (and for the Restaurant in my living room), I only use butter. But there’s a [...]

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