Tag: mesquite flour
As part of my new found hobby of baking (and the BBA Challenge), I’m trying not to buy store bought bread. Since I had finally used up all the polenta (so couldn’t make the Anadama Bread), I decided to knock off another formula in the BBA Challenge.
When planning to make the Light Wheat Bread, I decided to get a little adventurous however. I had a bunch of mesquite flour left over from the Mesquite Chocolate Chip cookies (due to a mistake by the mesquite flour company). I figured I’d replace the Whole Wheat flour in the formula with mesquite flour. Other than that, this formula is a pretty typical sandwich bread recipe. Its actually pretty similar to what my grandpa used to make in his bread machine. In addition to the usual suspects of flour, yeast, and water the bread has dry milk and honey (or sugar) to enrich the dough. The mesquite flour gave the bread a very distinct aroma and taste. I used a local sage honey as my sweetener which complemented the mesquite flour quite nicely. The bread definitely had an sweet earthy flavor thanks to the mesquite. It was also denser than I suspect the loaf would have been with whole wheat flour. I don’t think it took anything away from the bread though. It was a fun experiment.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/03/light-wheat-bread/
I’ve had the
Super Natural Cooking cookbook by Heidi Swanson (of
101 Cookbooks) for a few years now. One of the recipes that I marked right away was this cookie recipe. The only thing holding up a batch of these cookies however was getting some Mesquite flour. Mesquite flour is made from the pods of the Mesquite (not the wood) which is ground up into a flour or meal. Of course in the book there are resources on where to order it online, but I never got around to doing that.
This year, as part of my Christmas present, my girlfriend gave me a half pound of Mesquite flour from the
Arizona Mesquite Company. So it was finally time to make the cookies. Baking with the mesquite flour was fun. The flour is very aromatic, and while its only a fraction of the flour in these cookies, you can definitely smell its there. There was one casualty while baking these cookies though. Breaking from my normal routine of only mixing by hand, I pulled out the electric hand mixer. Just as I was about done mixing there was a spark and smoke from the inside of the mixer. The mixer alas had mixed its last. I guess that’s what I get for trying to use technology while baking. In the end it was worth it though…these cookies were quite good.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.rhinoblues.com/thoughts/2010/01/mesquite-chocolate-chip-cookies/
