One of my favorite cooking books is Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I recently discovered a group who was baking their way through this amazing compilation of bread and decided to give it a try! The BBA Challenge was brought to us by Nicole of Pinch My Salt.
Anadama Bread is the first recipe of the book. It's an old New England Bread that appears in many books on bread. I've tried it in the past and didn't care for the consistency or taste, so passed on making this when I initially bought The BBA. I believe that previous attempts with different recipes went south because the soaker of corn meal was only a few hours and/or an overwhelming amount of molasses was used. After letting the soaker rest overnight, the cornmeal had an appealing fragrance and was fluffy.
The recipe was very easy and straight forward, no unusual ingredients or instruments needed to make this. The dough was amazing, supple and easy to knead by hand (since the hubs has yet to come through on his "I'll buy you a new KA mixer" proclamation which convinced me to sell my trusty mixer back in AK, LOL).
Since I couldn't find my normal sized bread pans, I split the dough into 5 small loafs. The finished bread definitely turned my opinion of this bread around. It wasn't dense, dry, or overpowered by the molasses.
My only complaint was that I couldn't remember what the heck I did with my stupid bread pans so that we could enjoy this with the BLTs we made for dinner last night!
