Bread - Research, Method, Practice!

... country seed bread in the blue bowl ...

In our class at UVic ("Indigenous Laws: Research Method, Practice") we had everything a person could want in a classroom. 

Tables that move, lots of space on the walls for flip charts, enough space for a circle on one side of the room and tables on the other side of the room, a screen on which to watch movies, and full length windows to a lush landscape.

The only thing that was missing was a place to pick up a muffin or a coffee at the break, since this is summer school and the concession is closed down.

Rebecca brought down two baskets full of tea.

Val brought in chocolate, cookies and fruit (huge bunches of grapes and oranges of every kind).

The only fly in the ointment was that the tea kettles would blow the electrical fuses. The university electrical system just isn’t set up to have two of them plugged in at the same time.

... testing testure ...
... afterall, it is just a science experiment with wheat ...

I brought along wheat products: black Russian bread, fig and fennel loaves and cinnamon buns. The first set of buns were about a 7 out of 10. Rebecca and I could tell without even tasting. But the last set got a solid A+. They would have won the prize at any county fair.

When our last class closed, when the tea had gone back upstairs, and when the posters were down from the walls, someone asked me, “Will I ever learn to make bread.”

“Yes,” I said.  "When do you want to start?"

“Sometime on the weekend. I am up at 7 am.”

“Fine, tomorrow at 8 at Rebecca’s house. Here is the address.”

And that is how our bread-making class started.

Three law-students, all of whom were willing to get up before 8 am, brought bread pans, or were willing to take the ones we have here, home.

Each made a recipe of basic white bread.

... the bread is covered and we are waiting for it to rise ..

Then someone tried to make country seed bread.

We were on a roll, experimenting. 

We made a basic recipe in the Kenmore basic mixing machine, just to demonstrate that bread can be made by machine.

Kim wondered how to make brown bread, so we took the recipe from the back of the 20 pound bag of Rogers whole wheat flour, and did the recipe to perfection, even adding the eggs, which I would have just omitted, except that we were into science this morning. Trying all of the variations we could think of, while drinking tea from a selection of Rebecca's hand-thrown mugs.

We pan fried some of the dough to make a form of bannock. We tried this twice, once adding in the country seed bread. Then we rolled cinnamon buns, the traditional way for our family.

Two of the women had come on bikes. The third (who came in a car,) put their bikes in the back of her car, and home they went to bake all of that bread.

Anyone can go out to the internet and find a video that teaches what we had fun doing this morning.

And it is possible to learn to make bread that way, so go other law-students go. Let that bread rise while you study.

Arta

p.s. from Rebecca... you can get those recipes on the Pilling Family Recipe Blog below ... and Arta says, 'Feel free to poke around there. Use the search engine in the upper left hand corner for anything else you want to look at.'

http://larchkitchens.blogspot.com/2013/09/russian-black-bread.html 

http://larchkitchens.blogspot.com/2013/09/russian-black-bread-part-iii_30.html

http://larchkitchens.blogspot.com/2013/09/multi-seed-bread.html