Bread Recipes & Ideas

I am one of the biggest proponents of breakfast that you will ever find. I work two blocks from my apartment, and still get up two hours before I have to be at work in order to make a substantive breakfast and to eat it at a leisurely pace.During the week I must have protein first thing in the morning. Most mornings I rely on a poached egg on toast to provide it, and the ancient family egg poacher that my parents packed me off to college with to make it.But the weekends are a different story.

Most commercially-made matzo is about as tasty as the cardboard box it comes in. We imagine that making it ourselves has to be an improvement and we’re curious to give it a try. Has anyone made homemade matzo before?The downside to making matzo at home is that it’s difficult to keep it kosher. Jewish law gives us only 18 minutes from the time the flour is first mixed with water to get the breads cooked.

Bialys are cousin to the bagel. They’re not boiled, just baked. And instead of a hole in the middle, these are stuffed with something savory, like caramelized onions, poppy seeds, or garlic and butter. All too often, we only get a tantalizing bite or two of that delicious filling. And this is why we like to make bialys at home where we can stuff them as much as we like.

stales a lot quickerIf you have more than just a few slices left when the bread starts to go stale, you can usually freshen it up for at least one more meal. Just spritz the surface of the loaf with a little water and bake it in a 350° oven for 5-10 minutes.The loaf will stale much more quickly after this, so use up the remainder in one of these ways:1.

From apple, brie, and turkey to a peanut butter and granola-filled wrap, there's something here for every passenger.

Citrus and poppy seeds go hand in hand, as do muffins and spring. So what better way to welcome in March than with these scrumptious orange-infused poppy seed muffins? The bright and sunny flavors are guaranteed to lift your winter spirits, even if the weather is not ready to comply.I have pretty strict requirements for the perfect muffin, and it’s taken me some time to nail my favorite down.

Parents who have spent any amount of time in the kitchen with kids know that messes are unavoidable. You can closely monitor measuring and use the biggest bowl imaginable, and you will still end up with flour on the floor. Avoiding these pitfalls is the premise of the popular “Bread in a Bag” recipes around the internet.

I’ve seen enough round-ups of Pinterest fails (and just very strange food ideas on Pinterest in general) to approach some of the recipes with a healthy dose of skepticism. That being said, when I see something that intrigues me, I’d rather give it a go myself than assume it won’t work. With Christmas just around the corner, I kept seeing this spinach and artichoke Christmas tree re-pinned on my feed (it’s been pinned more than 400,000 times!

While muffin tin desserts might feel “cutesy,” I’ll argue that they’re pretty darn practical. Sure, mini things are fun, but they also make a lot of sense regardless of the size group you’re serving. They travel well, don’t need to be cut or shared, and are usually just the right size to satisfy everyone’s sweet tooth after dinner. Here are 10 of our favorite mini treats.

Home cooks have to be a careful when it comes to a cookbook written by a restaurant chef. There often can be a disconnect between what it takes to get restaurant food onto our home tables when we don’t have exotic ingredients flown to our doors and a dozen employees to prep them, not to mention years of professional training and the extraordinarily high btu’s of a huge, multi-burner professional stove.

"The recipe literally makes about a cup-and-a-half of icing for a very small quantity of rolls. It's like they didn't test it at all."

If you ever want to start a war with England, you could try throwing all of your tea into the ocean, or you could just ask a room full of British people how to pronounce the word “scone,” then back up and let them take care of the rest. People have been arguing about the word “scone” for generations. Does it rhyme with “cone,” or does it rhyme with “gone”?

What do our fellow bloggers, writers, and online friends eat, first thing in the morning? We are asking some friends to share their favorite morning nourishment with us. I will cook and eat it too, and bring you their thoughts on what to eat first thing in the morning. Here’s Anne of Pret a Voyager. Ooh la la! This elegant breakfast left me feeling fabulous all morning long.

What do our fellow bloggers, writers, and online friends eat, first thing in the morning? We are asking some friends to share their favorite morning nourishment with us. I will cook and eat it too, and bring you their thoughts on what to eat first thing in the morning. Here’s Hannah of Bitter Sweet This muffin combines two of my favorite pantry staples: crunchy peanut butter and spicy candied ginger.

What do our fellow bloggers, writers, and online friends eat, first thing in the morning? We are asking some friends to share their favorite morning nourishment with us. I will cook and eat it too, and bring you their thoughts on what to eat first thing in the morning. Do the words “homemade pop tart” strike a chord within your soul? Kasey of Turntable Kitchen illuminates our minds and our bellies with this amazing recipe.

Have you tried this?

I thought my grandmother loathed my dad. So why did she send us to him with a bag of homemade doughnuts?

Croquembouche, a spun sugar tower of cream puffs, is French for “crunch in the mouth.” Of course it’s French – who else would concoct such a perilous pile of pastries?Traditionally served at weddings and holidays, it’s made of cream-filled pâte à choux pastry and anchored with caramel. And, along with most things having to do with weddings or French pastry, I have always considered cream puffs firmly outside my area of expertise.

That fresh farmer’s cheese we made earlier this week inspired these muffins. They have a tender, buttery base with just a touch of allspice, and ricotta enriched with egg for a creamy topping. Then we plunked heaping spoonfuls of homemade strawberry jam in the middle. They turned out moist and jammy, just buttery enough but not too sweet.

We like our muffins absolutely popping with blueberries, and we found that we like also them best in mini size – you’re guaranteed to get lots of blueberries in every bite with a one-bite muffin. Try them! They’re easy and quick.

Heidi said that she had been working on this cornbread recipe for a long time, and her photos showed a light, moist bread with a golden crust. It was worth a try.We made it last week to go with a homestyle dinner of pork slow-cooked with anise and white wine, broccoli steamed with soy sauce, and Herbed Skillet Sweet Potatoes. The plan was to serve the bread with some of that terribly good Browned Butter.

There’s nothing like a hot, steaming muffin and a cup of tea to get us out of bed in the morning. Muffins are portable and endlessly flexible; nearly any quick bread or cupcake recipe can be made into a muffin. They can be sweet, nutty, refined, or whole grain. These muffins were born out of our love of tea – especially tea with citrus and spices – and a packet of dried peaches.

Have you ever cut into a loaf of freshly baked bread and found a spot of gooey dough, right in the center? I have! I’ve also roasted rolls into dry, crumbly nuggets — never a good thing. The key, I’ve found, to baking really great bread and rolls is using my trusty kitchen thermometer to tell me precisely when the bread is ready. Read on for tips on using your thermometer to get just the right texture in your homemade bread and rolls.

It’s not often that we buy a cookbook for just one recipe, but we confess we did that here. All it took was one photo…The Oat, Pear, and Raspberry Loaf is from bills open kitchen (his lack of proper capitalization/punctuation, not ours, we hasten to add) by Bill Granger, and it was the first thing that greeted us as we flipped through this book at a used-book store.The whole grains of the oats and the oozing streak of jammy pear-and-raspberry fruitiness stopped us cold.

There’s quite a debate going at our earlier post about sweet versus savory cornbread. It seems like many of you feel strongly about the matter! Well, for those of you who love the savory stuff, here’s a recipe to wash the taste of sweet cornbread out of your mouth forever – you’ll never make any other kind, after you’ve tried this.This recipe comes from Things Cooks Love, which we reviewed yesterday.

We had take-out from our favorite Indian restaurant last night. Everything was delicious, but, as usual, the naan didn’t fare so well on the trip to our apartment. It was soggy and had lost most of the airy oomph we love.With bread baking becoming such an easy, unintimidating task these days, we thought, “Why not naan?”Below, see the recipes we found…Naan bread isn’t so different from other bread. There’s yeast and water and rising and rolling.

An egg on a crispy slice of toast is an essential part of our morning routine. We usually buy whole grain or oatmeal bread, but when we ran out of bread a few days ago, we decided to plunge into baking a sandwich loaf.

It’s a sick day for me, so I’m working at home on some recipes. With a congested head, I made the first mistake in cooking: I didn’t check to see if I had all the ingredients I needed before starting to test my winter breakfast bread wreath, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow’s email for that.I didn’t have enough butter. Ouch, the yeast was already dissolving in warm water and the flour was already out. What’s a cook to do? Make English Muffins.

I’ve been writing about this wreath on the site since 2008, each year updating the story, because I think it’s worth reminding you how perfect this bread is to start a holiday morning. When I say I make it every year, I’m not kidding. It weaves its way deeper and deeper into our family’s memory each holiday.

Diet-specific recipes usually aren’t our thing, but we thought this one might be worth a shot. We were intrigued to see sour cream on the ingredient list and liked the fact that this recipe didn’t rely on any ingredient substitutes to achieve its healthiness. Here’s the verdict…Overall, we thought these muffins were pretty darn good! They were a bit dense and chewy, but in a way we found pleasing and very enjoyable to bite into!

Being fans of both homemade bread and Cook’s Illustrated, of course we had to try the ciabatta recipe from the March/April issue! The recipe was pretty elaborate, including both a preferment made the night before and many detailed steps on baking day. But we were undaunted…If you’re at all curious about baking and bread chemistry, the article preceding the recipe has a wealth of information.

Emma’s recent post on hoarding ingredients inspired us to break open this can of chestnut paste we bought at Bay Cities but weren’t quite sure what to do with. We didn’t want to go out and buy more ingredients, so we poked around the refrigerator and pantry. When we found apples, spices, and frozen puff pastry, we immediately thought of riffing on Patricia Samson’s Delicieuse Home Made Apple Tart.

These muffins from Gourmet are made with whole wheat pastry flour, which as we know from this post has a low protein content. That means you get a healthier muffin with a slightly richer flavor without the dense texture that you might think of when it comes to whole wheat. And there’s one other fantastic thing about this recipe…We love that the batter makes exactly one dozen (full-size) muffins.

Now that it’s finally cool enough to turn on our ovens again, we’re getting back into the habit of baking bread at home. Last weekend, we made a few loaves of sandwich bread to eat during the week. Here’s how we shaped the loaves: 1. The Finished Loaf – Here’s what we’re aiming for! 2. Shape the Dough into a Round – Start by shaping your risen dough into a round. Let it rest for a few minutes after you do this to give the gluten a chance to relax.

Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a DayTwo things that a transplanted New York bagel-snob like me doesn’t like to admit are: 1) New York bagels aren’t quite what they used to be, and 2) I like cinnamon-raisin bagels, even though they’re newfangled.

This simple no-knead bread is studded with walnuts and raisins, and has just a hint of cinnamon. We could have this for breakfast or we could just as easily serve it alongside a hearty meal. It’s also a perfect example of the kind of simple, elegant recipes we found in Jim Lahey’s new book, My Bread When I was in Tuscany and my love affair with baking was growing, one of the most enjoyable yet simplest brads I learned about was a version of this raisin walnut bread.

Whole-wheat breads are an acquired taste, in my opinion. Some people love them, some people learn to love them, and some people (like me) never quite warm up to their bitter, earthy flavors. Enter this new no-knead bread recipe. If you’ve never really liked whole-grain breads but wish you did, you’ve got to give this recipe a try. It’s definitely changed the way I feel about whole-wheat loaves! My dad is actually the mastermind behind this recipe.

Yesterday we talked about how to how to make bread dough and how to knead it, too! Today we’re looking at how to shape a nice, round, artisan-style loaf of bread. It’s easy — here’s how we do it. Ingredients1 batch of bread dough, after its first riseFlour EquipmentBench scraper 1. Scrape the bread dough out of its bowl and gather it into one large lump in your hand. Fold it over itself and keep pulling it taut, like an upside-down bowl.2.

Crusty on the outside, chewy and soft in the middle – what’s not to love about baguettes?! It’s hard to get a truly authentic French baguette in our home ovens, but we can get mighty close. Try this method for shaping baguette loaves with any favorite bread dough recipe – even the no-knead bread dough works quite well!

Whether or not you agree that doughnuts might be the new cupcake, you have to admit that these delicious doughnut recipes cropping up all over the place are mighty tempting! So tempting, in fact, that this might be what finally gets us to try deep frying at home. Just take a look at these recipes!1. Glazed Doughnuts from the Pioneer Woman – Simple glazed donuts are always a favorite, and this is a good basic recipe to start with.2.

The new Winter/Spring Canal House Cooking is out and like the previous editions, it’s a winner! Read on for a quick review and the recipe for their utterly delicious Lemon and Sea Salt Focaccia, pictured above.We’ve been very happy with the previous two editions of Canal House Cooking, the exciting cookbook project from Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton. They’ve just released the Volume III for Winter/Spring and we’re still very happy!

Although eating chocolate everyday for breakfast is a bit over the top, it does make for a great pick-me-up at the end of a week, or a rich addition to a breakfast or brunch spread. These double chocolate muffins have a hint of butterscotch and rich undertones of dark brown sugar. They’re good any time of the day and a snap to whip up without any butter creaming or need for a mixer!

biga starter Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread with Oats and Pecans Made with Biga Starter Makes two 9 x 5-inch loaves Equipment: two 9 x 5-inch loaf pans, oiled Mildly sweet and slightly crunchy, our version of whole wheat–oatmeal bread is great for tuna sandwiches. Cut in thick slices, it’s perfect for French toast. Shape it into rolls for a dinner party or a family picnic.

This recipe started out on a splattered, stained note card in my grandmother’s kitchen, and it has made its way into a lovely cookbook that’s very personal to me (more on that below). The filling could not be easier to make. You can use it several different ways, but I think these two-bite tartlets would be perfect for Mother’s Day or a little girl’s baby shower.So, here’s the story on the cookbook.