My California to Ireland with Italian husband, Small-Holder friend has the Bread Bakers Apprentice and it is awesome, so is the King Arthur Bread book which she also has; I am thinking of breaking down and seeing if I can order them over from the US; expensive but probably worth it. She showed me a recipe from the Bread Baker's Apprentice that was a very basic, European style Italian bread with no kneading but to get the big holes and fermented taste, you keep punching it down by hand or with a dough scraper every half an hour or so for about 4 hours. You have to be home to do this, but the results are magical - what you are doing is over-rising the dough repeatedly but it doesn't go nasty sour because you are manipulating it frequently. The timing isn't exact and the recipe is very forgiving; I've made faster versions in two hours and longer ones in about eight - and I was actually using the dough cycle on my previous bread baker so the dough had been kneading in a normal fashion first, which you don't have to do, it was just easier for me that way.
I like all kinds of bread both sweet and savory but that Italian bread recipe finally was the winner that kept husband and German house-mate from constantly buying bread at the stop to get a real "Italian" or "French" like log-loaf. I've not worked out some variations that work well - one half butter milk and one half water also give a nice texture/taste (similar to whey) without the prolonged punch and pull but the loaves are larger (so I'm experimenting on the right amounts of dough to use). I also want to try with with home-ground whole wheat flour (half and half with the organic white) to see how that goes, but I have to get husband to help me grind it.
I really want to get away from the store bought loaf because I got such bad reactions in the US (acid reflux etc, finally vomiting all the usual stuff) until I started eating mostly organic when I hit Berkeley and boom all symptoms were gone. While I was there I saw the first article on the Monsanto spraying right before harvest to "dry" the wheat and my husband said my symptoms were exactly what you would expect with some sort of poisoning, especially the rapid recovery. No wonder the majority of people I baked bread for, for years in the US now find they are reacting to wheat...
Anyway, I have heard that a lot of the Canada wheat being imported for hard-bread flour here in Ireland (and the UK) is now being treated this way, I hadn't noticed because well I always order organic flour anywhere. But for this reason, I think it even more important than all the other usual reasons to bake as much of the bread as we can eat at home; I am still eating way too many commercial tortillas; partly because my shoulder makes rolling them out difficult and because I have yet to find a good freezing system for the home made ones but I'm working on it. I figure one thing at a time, I have made them, I know how to do them and they would be much better for us. Now that I have finally found a bread that everyone likes, along with the occasional changes that husband and I both like like good potato bread, rye bread, egg bread, bagels etc; I figure I can start working on the tortilla issue.
