Raisin and Nut Bread

While this is not the worst tasting bread I've made so far (that honor, even though it wasn't really that bad, goes to the Bavarian Rye of early February) this was easily the most disappointing loaf. So, follow this recipe at your own risk...

Start off by proofing 2 1/2 teaspoons of yeast in 1/2 a cup of warm water with 2 tablespoons of honey. While that is sitting for a few minutes, we'll again heat up 1 3/4 cups of milk and 4 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan (with 2 teaspoons of salt, as well). Once the milk and butter is warm, add the liquids together and stir in about 6 cups of all-purpose flour. Knead well (another easily-kneaded type of dough this week, I'm afraid), put in a buttered bowl, cover and set aside in a warm, draft-free spot. Also, start soaking 1/2 cups of raisins in a bit of "cognac" (what the recipe calls for...but which translates roughly into "cheap brandy" on a grad student's budget) as the bread undergoes the

First Rising (1 hour)
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I did not go to a large state school as an undergraduate. This does not really come as any news to me (nor does it, I expect, to you!). Still, this week a pair of events reminded me of how different my undergraduate education was than what students get here. Last Tuesday I got an email from one of my students asking if I would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for her for some summer internship or other. Of course I was happy to, but the idea of it somewhat startled me. After all, this is a student (a junior) that I've seen in class once a week, for two hours at a time, for just under half of a semester. That I might be one of the teachers she thinks would best be able to write a rec. just seems strange to me. I remember feeling a bit funny when, needing one more such letter when applying to grad schools, I had to ask a professor that I had only taken one tutorial and a class from.

And on the other side of the college-experience-spectrum, last Friday was "Unofficial" (as in "unofficial St. Patrick's Day"), when students more or less start drinking early in the morning and keep at it until Saturday. To illustrate, on my way to the office at about 7:30 that morning I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts to pick up some doughnut holes for my class that afternoon (wanting to give the, as it turned out, 11 of 23 students that actually made it to class that afternoon a little treat), but there was a large group of green-clad students just in front of me in line, already quite loud and boisterous, that bought every doughnut left in the store. Apparently last year (I was reading this in the student paper last week) arrests and citations were handed out to students from 46 different universities.
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Take the dough out of the oven, punch it down, and let rest for a few minutes. Then, strain the raisins, and knead both them and about 1/2 a cup of chopped walnuts into the dough. This is really, really gross. You see, those raisins, strained or no, still are covered with and contain a fair amount of brandy. And maybe you pour alcohol all over yourself because you enjoy both that sticky texture of spilled drinks and smelling like you've been drinking since 9 in the morning... But not so much for me.

So anyway, after kneading in the raisins this dough gets sticky and quite difficult to work with. Divide it into two equal pieces and place in a buttered 9x5 and 8x4 bread pan. Now, perhaps a moment's thought is enough to convince you that dividing dough into equal pieces and placing them into different sized bread pans doesn't really make all that much sense. I think you'd be right, and that you'd clearly make for a more sensible baker than I.

Place the two bread pans in that warm, draft-less spot and let the bread undergo the

Second Rising (40 minutes)
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Otherwise, not too much is really going on with me these days...In the "apartment-improvement" category, thanks to a pair of gifts through the mail over the past two weeks I finally have an average of more than one decorative item per room! Quite an improvement from my college-dorm days, I think you'll agree.

Aside from that, this week I've been practicing getting so little sleep as to wonder if my mind is starting to slip a bit (no snide comments on that, please). Case in point: last Wednesday night I had to stay up late enough doing work that, if I was interested in maximizing time asleep I wouldn't have bothered walking back to my apartment (but, and I think quite reasonably, I'm more interested in succeeding at the "never-spend-an-entire-night-in-the-physics-building game). Now, first, that next Thursday started out brilliantly! Somehow when I woke up I knew the answer to a question I couldn't figure out before going to sleep, which put me in a rather good mood. But then, on my walk back to the office, I was cutting through a parking lot and I thought I saw a ribbon-sticker on a car that said "Green's functions!" (which, in case you were wondering, are a particularly useful tool for solving differential equations in lots of physics problems). I thought it more than a little odd that anybody would ever put a sticker like that on their car, so I looked again. And upon closer inspection the sticker actually said, "I adopted a dog." That episode worried me a bit. And convinced me to go to sleep at the earliest possible moment.
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Bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. Then, to give the crust extra color and texture, take the loaves out of the bread pans and let the bread cook directly on the oven racks for another 4 or 5 minutes.

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Tasting verdict: Well, as you can see from this picture, somehow not too many nuts or raisins made it to the center of this loaf. I thought I had done a good job kneading everything in, but apparently somehow everything migrated to the surface of the bread while it was rising and baking. I'm not quite sure how that happened. So, this basically tastes like a slightly-too-sweet white bread with a really weird crust of raisins and walnuts that range from nice and crispy (on the top of the loaf) to burned (on the bottom of the loaf). Overall, it tastes fine, but is rather disappointing in terms of how much extra work it was compared to how plain it turned out.

Currently reading: Just finished the Borges from the last two weeks (quite literally...I read the last pages while this bread was in the oven), and on the way to the office I stopped at the library and picked up The Hunting of the Snark (still one of my favorite Lewis Carroll works) and Ibsen's Peer Gynt (which was not a play I realized even existed before today...but hey, I like Grieg's suite, so maybe I'll like this too, right?)

Next week: Looking back at what I've made so far, I've managed some classic American breads, a few from Scandinavia, and a few German-ish loaves. Maybe next week I'll try a French bread? A brioche or some sort of baguette, perhaps...