I have been working on a multigrain bread recipe using honey for a while and I have ended up going back to my original idea….using Red River cereal. I had been given a recipe about 20 years ago that included Red River cereal as one of the ingredients. Unfortunately that recipe made 5 loaves of bread and my family found it to be quite heavy. So by merging a whole wheat honey recipe into this old recipe I have come up with this one.
Bread
Best Homemade Pizza
I have been making this pizza dough ever since it was published in Bon Appetit a while back. It has even replaced my go-to recipe for our wood-fired pizza oven so that tells you just how good it is. I have gone back to baking my pizzas in a pan! It results in a thicker crust, but it is nice and crispy and chewy and has a fantastic texture.
This dough is very forgiving and most times I will make it in the morning and put it in a very large bowl, cover it and let it rise all day until it is time to bake pizza. I find that the longer the dough rises, the better the flavour is. I have even put it in a plastic bag and kept it in the fridge for a few days before baking it and it was fantastic.
So back to the wood-fired pizza oven, because this dough has a quite a bit of oil in it, it is very difficult to put on a pizza peel and slide onto the stone. I can tell you this because I tried it and ended up with a really ugly looking calzone stuck to the bottom of my pizza oven! It smelled really good until it started to burn, but then at least I could scrape it off and start over. So if you do decide to slide it directly on to your stone, ensure you sprinkle lots of cornmeal down first ! That’s when I decided to make the pizza on a baking sheet and put the sheet directly on to the stone. That pizza was terrific!
If you don’t have a pizza oven, no worries, this pizza will cook up beautifully in a really hot oven. I like at least 450ºF. Remember to always put your pizza stone in the oven before you turn it on, this way it will have lots of time to absorb the heat. It is a good idea to let the oven come to temperature and then wait at least another 10-15 minutes for the stone to get really good and hot. If it is a hot day and you still want to make pizza, you can use your gas/propane bbq to cook your pizza, just put your pizza stone on the grill and let it heat up and away you go – a pizza oven outside!
Best Homemade Pizza
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Author: Tammy
Serves: 1 pizza
Ingredients
- 2 tsp instant yeast
- 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for bowl, plus more for pan
- 2 teaspoons sea salt
- 4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1½ c warm water
Instructions
- Whisk together yeast and 1½ cups warm water (105–110°) in bowl of stand mixer; let stand until yeast starts to foam, about 5-10 minutes.
- Add in 2 Tbsp. oil, then flour and sprinkle salt on top.
- Using dough hook, mix on low speed until dough comes together, then continue to mix with dough hook until smooth and soft. This usually takes about 5 - 7 minutes.
- Place dough in a lightly oiled bowl, turning it a few times so that it is well coated. Ensure the bowl is large enough that will allow the dough to at least double, more is better. Cover loosely with plastic wrap.
- At this point you can refrigerate the dough if using the next day. If using same day, put in draft free spot and let rise. If the dough starts to climb over the top, gently push down with the palms of your hands through the plastic wrap.
- Best if you let rise at least 4-6 hours, preferably 8.
- When ready to make pizza,coat a sheet pan or a cookie sheet with raised edges liberally with olive oil. Gently turn dough out of bowl onto pan. Let it rest for 10 minutes before attempting to work with the dough.Then using your fingers work the dough out into the pan, if it starts to spring back, let it rest again. You may need to do this a few times before you have it reaching all sides.
- Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let it rise again about 30 minutes. At this point put your pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 450 degrees. Once the dough has puffed, gently spread your sauce and add your toppings.
- Place on pizza stone and bake for about 15-20 minutes or until golden around the edges and cheese is melted.
- With a wooden or metal spatula, slide the pizza onto a wooden cutting board. Let sit for 5 minutes before slicing.
- Adapted from Bon-Appetit
Blueberry Zucchini Loaf
It was a spectacular weekend at camp. The weather was hot, 30ºC, almost too hot for me. It is sometimes hard to believe that 6 months from today, it could be -30ºC! What a wonderful place Northern Ontario is. It has been so hot, windy and dry that the wild blueberries have been hard to find this year. The berries in most of my usual spots have been all dried up, but I got lucky and the one just down the road had some under the trees in the moss. I picked 4 cups, enough to make something….what should I make with my valuable commodity?
The decision Blueberry Zucchini Loaf…a quick loaf full of shredded zucchini, lemon zest and my wild blueberries. This recipe makes 2 loaves so 1 to eat and 1 to freeze or share. As with most quick breads this is mixed by hand in a bowl, no appliances required, other than a box shredder for the zucchini if you consider that to be an appliance.
This is the perfect snack to take on a picnic lunch while fishing and that is exactly what we did with our Blueberry Zucchini loaf. Thank goodness that the loaf made it into the cooler, because I forgot the rest of the containers that had the salads in them. We survived the day and so did the fish as we didn’t even catch one!
I hope you have the opportunity in your neck of the woods to enjoy wild blueberries and make something yummy with them, or just enjoy them one at a time – a burst of wonderful.
Blueberry Zucchini Loaf
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Serves: 2 loaves
Ingredients
- 3 eggs, lightly beaten
- ½ cup vegetable oil
- ½ cup regular yogurt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- zest of one lemon
- 1½ cups white sugar
- 2 cups shredded zucchini
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon baking soda
- 1 cup fresh blueberries
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease 2 loaf pans.
- In a large bowl, beat together the eggs, oil, yogurt,vanilla,lemon zest and sugar. Fold in the zucchini.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, salt,baking powder and baking soda.
- Sprinkle dry ingredients over the wet and stir until almost combined.
- Gently fold in the blueberries. Divide equally between the 2 pans and smooth the tops.
- Bake 50 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a skewer inserted in the center of a loaf comes out clean. Cool 20 minutes in pans, then turn out onto wire racks to cool completely.
Homemade Hamburger Buns
I have been searching for a good dough recipe for hamburger buns for quite a while. I really don’t like buying store bought bread of any sort, but making the perfect hamburger bun has eluded me for quite some time. My son, Matthew, is the connoisseur of hamburger buns. If the bun falls apart while he is eating it is a world calamity. If the bun isn’t big enough for the burger that is another issue. It has to be sturdy enough to hold all of the condiments but not too thick. So you can see finding the perfect hamburger bun is a huge challenge at my house, let alone making one from scratch.
Rhubarb Pecan Loaf
Well this is the third post that is all about rhubarb! We haven’t tired of eating it yet, so there may still be more to come. I hope you love rhubarb as much as we do!
The batter for this loaf comes together quickly and no mixer required, so you can make it quietly in the morning and pop it in the oven so your family wakes up to the smell of rhubarb and cinnamon. A few slices and a cup of coffee starts a morning off perfectly.
Cheese Biscuits
Warm, fluffy, cheese biscuits with a bowl of homemade soup – just what a damp,rainy spring day calls for. These biscuits are simple to whip together and make any bowl of soup a whole lot more satisfying. Using old cheddar cheese elevates the biscuits from simple to spectacular.
Cinnamon Buns
These cinnamon buns are a family favourite at our house and quite a few houses other homes we know. Our neighbour at our cottage Gord has been known to hide out in his truck and eat an entire pan by himself and deny to his wife that I had dropped off any cinnamon buns!
Warm cinnamon buns will make anyone happy. You can make the buns up the night before – after rolling and cutting the buns cover them with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge overnight. In the morning pull them out of the fridge when you get up, preheat the oven, jump in the shower and when you get out, pop the pan in the oven and 25 minutes later – heaven!
Bring these to work with you still warm in the pan and you will have smiles on everyone’s faces.
Add some glaze and you have something pretty and delicious!
Hearty Quick Bread
This quick bread has so many yummy things in it – banana, apple sauce, dates, raisins, oatmeal- the list just goes on. My friend Karen had shared a new recipe with me that she said I had to try as it was fantastic. So Saturday morning at camp I decide to give it a try and as usual I didn’t have all of the ingredients and ended up changing it up quite a bit and I have to say the result was a definite winner. Someday I will make Karen’s recipe in it’s original version ( it has different yummy things in it) but this one is going into the favourites category for breakfast.
It is very moist and will keep well for a few days, if it lasts that long!
Cardamon Bread (Pulla)
I first tasted Pulla bread, known in Northern Ontario as Finn bread, when I purchased it a Christmas craft sale about 15 years ago. I had never tasted the spice cardamon before that, but I was hooked. Cardamon is peppery, but is perfect in baking. It even looks like flecks of pepper through the dough. The bread was as beautiful as it was tasty. Braided bread, who knew there was such a thing.
I had made it quite a few times after that using recipes I had found in local cook books and later on-line, but then the Bon-Appetite issue with their Master Sweet Dough recipe arrived! That was it, the perfect recipe for Pulla!
Banana Bread
What to do with all those ripe bananas sitting on the kitchen counter that no one will eat? Banana bread ! If by chance you don’t have any really ripe bananas you can speed up the ripening process with a simple little trick. Place bananas on a parchment lined cookie sheet and bake in a 300 degree F oven for about 15 minutes until they turn black. Let them cool and then peel and mash – instant ripe bananas for the times that the craving for banana bread strikes and you find yourself with only perfect bananas.
This version is a little healthier, less oil than most recipes call for. I have replaced some of the oil with yogurt and the result is a moist loaf that keeps well. If you don’t have yogurt you can substitute sour cream instead. But don’t use fat free yogurt or sour cream – the results just won’t be the same.
You can sweeten this loaf up with the addition of chocolate chips and then it becomes almost a dessert. Add cranberries or raisins and then you have a loaf with some texture and colour. With some nuts, add some crunch! Where ever your imagination takes you!
Plain with peanut butter spread nice and thick is my favourite way to have it for breakfast.
Enjoy!
Banana Bread
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Author: Tammy
Serves: 1 loaf
Ingredients
- ½ cup plain or vanilla yogurt
- ⅓ cup vegetable or canola oil
- 2 eggs
- 1 cup mashed ripe bananas
- ½ cup white sugar
- 1¾ cup all purpose flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 cup of added ins of your choice
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
- Line a 9x5 loaf pan with parchment paper or grease well.
- In a large bowl whisk together sugar,flour,baking soda and salt.
- In a small bowl whisk together eggs,banana,oil and yogurt.
- Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir together until just combined.
- Pour batter into prepared pan.
- Bake 45-55 min in preheated oven until toothpick inserted in centre comes out clean.
- Cool in pan on wire rack for 20 min, then remove loaf from pan to cool completely on wire rack.