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Luterans and Lectio Divina

4/25/2014

Wednesday I spoke with a class of Lutheran seminarians about Benedictine spirituality. It was great fun and they were completely engaged, PLUS it was an excuse to make a rich egg bread and serve it with real butter and St. Bede honey. Part of my lecture had to do with Lectio Divina, the traditional monastic method for meditation on and prayer with sacred scripture. If you're interested in the subject, click HERE for the text of chapter four of my book Bake and Be Blessed: bread baking as a metaphor for spiritual growth. It's a basic introduction to the method.

Another very fine spiritual resource for bakers is Becoming Bread, a book of poetic reflections about embracing the spiritual in the everyday, by Gunilla Norris. I used it for a private retreat one year and was profoundly affected by it---find it on her website HERE.

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Good Friday: Honey Corn Rolls

4/18/2014

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Good Friday for supper we had baked cod (no surprise there!) and I wanted to make something homemade but not too fancy. I settled on honey corn rolls, which are hearty and filling as well as tasty, and on a day when we get only one full meal, that's an ideal combination. The recipe will appear in my new cookbook , The Breadhead Bible, which will be available May 1st, but here's a sneak preview.

I had a lot of dough, so I made a couple of round loaves as well, including this one with a bee design, which I cut into the dough with a tomato knife just before it went into the oven. I thought it might distort a lot more, but it turned out pretty well. This loaf is about 8" across, just to give you some perspective. I think I'll have to try some other designs on other breads, just for fun.

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Holy Thursday: Whole wheat rounds

4/17/2014

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Every year for supper on Holy Thursday I like to serve whole wheat bread, usually medium size loaves with a cross cut in them, one loaf for every set of four monks. This year they turned out unusually pretty, or at least the photo did, so I thought I'd share it. As I often do, I added some potato to the mix for a tender crumb and used honey as the sweetener. We have plenty of honey (although we lost more than half our hives over the long, hard winter) but my friend Dan gave me some of his that had sugared up pretty heavily. You can easily restore crystallized honey by warming the jar in a saucepan of water over low heat, but in this case just pulled out a few tablespoons and added it to the liquids. Honey makes for a beautifully browned crust, but it can also cause the crust to get too dark. Many bakers recommend turning the oven temp down by 25 degrees, or covering the loaves lightly with foil for the last half of the baking time. I did neither, but I like the results I got. Hope the brethren will, too.

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Breadhead Roadtrips

4/12/2014

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This is Joan and her mom, a pair of Bread-heads who contacted me earlier this week in the hope of arranging a brief visit to the abbey. I met them at a bread demo in St. Peter MO a couple of years ago, and Joan said that a visit to the abbey was on her Bucket List. Since I was free for the afternoon I was happy to receive them. We toured the abbey church and some of the public areas of the monastery proper, saw a little bit of the grounds, and ended up in the monastery refectory eating Magic Bread with homemade apple butter, before they left with a blessing and the rest of the loaf.
My only point in posting this brief log is to let Breadheads know that they can indeed visit the monastery, stay as overnight guests and even make a weekend or week-long retreat here. We find it difficult to properly host people who just "drop by" unannounced, in part because the guest rooms may be full and/or the community at work or prayer. But you can always contact me through this website to arrange a visit. If I have enough free time, you can even get a bread lesson!

On an entirely unrelated note, here is a picture of a sandwich-size cutting board with a matching butter spreader I made out of vintage oak salvaged from our old choir chapel. I also posted this picture on my Facebook Page, and from the response I gather that I will need to make a lot more of these and make them available for sale online!

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Useful tools

4/6/2014

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After a demo I'm often asked about the tools I use, and some Breadheads who attended my Eureka demo asked about them. The polka dot rolling pin was made by my father, using cherry wood with maple inserts. It's a little bit wider than standard rolling pins, and not quite so big around. It took me awhile to get used to a pin without a center rod---one solid piece of wood---but now I prefer it, in part because it allows you to push as hard as you want on stiffer doughs. I keep trying to convince my brother to take up the mantle and start turning these on the lathe he inherited from dad's shop--we'll see.

The center tool is a brotpisker or Danish dough whisk. It's the best utensil around for mixing bread dough, muffin batter, cookie dough, cornbread, waffles---any time liquid and flour meet in a bowl. My mom got my dough whisk for a quarter at a rummage sale in 1979, and I've used it to mix up thousands of batches of bread dough. They're available online from several sources, including King Arthur Flour, Amazon, and Sur La Table. They come in two sizes (14" and 11") but I'd just get the larger one, unless you never mix anything but pancakes.

Only paid $19.99 at the local Ace Hardware, so wait for a sale.

The other useful utensil in my toolbox (and yes, I keep my baking gadgets in a DeWalt toolbox) is a flour wand (see photo above): a tool made of wire with a squeeze handle and a spring coil on the end. Also called a Flour duster, it was first developed in Victorian times when pie making become especially popular. When the handle is squeezed, the spring opens up, which is then swirled in the flour container. Releasing the handle traps the flour in the coil, which is then shaken gently to sprinkle just the right amount flour onto the counter top. If you’ve ever had both hands covered in raw pie crust or sticky bread dough and have been reluctant to reach into the flour canister, you’ll understand why this tool is particularly valuable. They are available in some specialty shops and on several websites online, including the ones mentioned above. However, I recommend that you pay a little more and buy one from Best Manufacturing of Portland, Oregon. There are cheaper models out there, but theirs is far better-made and long-lasting. The price ranges from $10 to $17 on Amazon, so you can put it on a wishlist and wait for the price to go down.

Can you be successful at baking without these specialized tools? Sure---thousands of generations of bakers did just fine with wooden spoons and a wood burning stove. But they can make your baking experience easier and more enjoyable, and the pleasure that comes from using a well-made tool makes me want to bake more often, and none of my brother monks ever complain about that!

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Eureka Illinois: "Herb Breads with a Meaning"

4/5/2014

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Today at a fundraiser for Eureka College Women's Board I made "Herb Breads with a Meaning" and since I'm trying to reduce the amount of paper I use/waste, I'm posting all the recipes here online, so that people can download them to computer or tablet. I know I throw away about 75% of the handouts I receive at meetings and workshops, so I figured this would be a good way to "go green." The recipes I presented:
Chocolate Mint Muffins
Housewarming Rolls
Herbal Encouragement Bread

Here are some photos from the event

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Luterans and Lectio Divina

Good Friday: Honey Corn Rolls

Holy Thursday: Whole wheat rounds

Breadhead Roadtrips

Useful tools

Eureka Illinois: "Herb Breads with a Meaning"

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