Georg and I both really hate what I call "sponge bread": basically, bread that has the texture of a soft sponge. Well, sponge bread is OK for a sandwich, but we don't eat many sandwiches. Georg asked me to get some bread while I was at Kroger, but since I was at the Kroghetto on 2nd St., of course, they only had sponge bread. I knew I had some whole wheat flour at home, so I bought some yeast and resorted to making some decent bread on my own. I'd made some bread in high school (it was always bad because I was never patient enough to let it rise) and I'd watched Mom and Granny make bread or yeast rolls a million times. I found a recipe on Cooks.com (not a site I regularly use, but this recipe was good) that seemed reliable--reviewers said that the recipe yielded a dough that consistently rose despite the heaviness of whole wheat flour. Thus, I mixed up some warm water and yeast with some honey and salt, let the yeast activate. Then I stirred in the flour, kneaded the dough, and set it in a window to rise. I DID add some gluten to the dough because since my KitchenAid mixer is being stored at my mother's, I didn't trust my puny arms to work the dough very well. The dough did rise nicely indeed, and I punched it down and formed it into two footlong baguettes. After the second rise, I scored the bread with a razor blade (a bit too shallowly, as you can see, but I didn't want to cut the dough fully in half) and stuck it in the oven atop a baking sheet greased and sprinkled with cornmeal. And after 20 minutes or so, I took the bread out of the oven, placed it on the heart-shaped cutting board you see here, and took this cute little picture. I was really pleased with the result: the bread had a nice crust, and the crumb was dense.
