I know I am posting about it a bit late, but I am participating in the BBA challenge put forth by Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Its quite an interesting challenge. The idea is to work through Peter Reinhart's book The Bread Baker's Apprentice at the rate of one recipe per week. Because life has gotten busy on me, I have not had the opportunity to post about any of them until now. I am really enjoying going through a cookbook and forcing myself to bake the recipes as they come. I never have made all of the recipes in one book before, I usually pick out several that intrigue me and leave the ones that seem too boring or too hard for later and then later never really comes.
The first of the challenge recipes was Anadama Bread. Peter Reinhart had a cute story to go along with this bread. Its a story about a man, whose wife is named Anna, leaves him with nothing but a bowl of cornmeal mush. He is so upset that he shouts "Anna, damn her!" and proceeds to throw a few more things into the bowl and voila (insert appropriate accent mark) there was Anadama bread. This was an interesting bread because it utilzed a cornmeal soaker. The idea is to extract as much flavor from the cornmeal as possible. The bread was fairly easy to put together and resulted in a hearty flavorful loaf. It was a good choice to start off our bread baking challenge.
