anadama bread with walnuts and sage

since the 52 week pie challenge ended, i have been asked what i will do next on this page.  now that the holiday season has ended, i can give that some thought.  my plan?  not much actually.  i am going to try and participate with the group that will be baking their way through the book baking with julia by dorie greenspan.  you may remember that the group was baking their way through dories book, baking: from my home to yours and posting every tuesday; they called themselves "tuesdays with dorie".  next month they plan to start baking with julia and dorie and since i have the book, i hope to join them.  in the mean time, i am bumbling around in the kitchen with cats underfoot and a husband hoping for treats.  i have also taken the time to explore other sites such as food52.com and this week, my post is a recipe that i entered into a contest on the site.

with a theme of walnut-sage, i knew it had to be bread.  right now, sage is one of the few herbs still available in my garden and with that in mind, i decided to make a batch of bread.  after searching, i settled on anadama bread and finally chose a recipe from peter reinharts book, the bread baker's apprentice.  there is a group that blogged their way through his book and this recipe was featured on the blog, brown eyed baker.  what i love about the recipe is all of the information that comes with it.  the bloggers also did a great job of posting lots of step by step photos so that i could look at several sites and see whether or not i was doing things correctly.  this recipe is also one that is easily manipulated and the few changes i made did not cause any trouble!

one of the first things i did was to pick a cornmeal.  sounds difficult doesn't it?  well if you are me and you have 4 different ones to choose from (not including the cornmeal masa) it can be.  my selection was brinsers best roasted yellow cornmeal.  it is a golden yellow color with a slightly toasted flavor.

to make the soaker, boiling water is added to the cornmeal and it is allowed to sit out overnight.  now you can see the color difference that the roasting adds, can you imagine the flavor?

the soaker is added to a sponge and this is allowed to age for an hour or two. 

fresh picked sage leaves from the garden

the sponge is now ready to be kneaded into bread

toasted walnuts added along with the sage

ten minutes of kneading and now we wait...90 minutes later, loaves are ready to proof!

mmmmmmmm.........

looks wonderful and it made fantastic blt's!  we used a recipe for tempeh bacon from happy healthy life, picked some lettuce and arugula from the hoop garden and made blt's with avocado.  let's just say that dinner was fabulous!  as a cookbook author, i understand the need for people to buy books so i will not post the recipe again here but you can look at it on the brown eyed baker's blog or read my version here.

and just because i am done with pies doesn't mean i don't want to hear from you!  make it and send me a photo, i will post it here!!!