Rye bread without the work...

I was looking to make some bread today, but I didn't have a lot of time to mess around waiting on rising times and what not... so I looked through the new King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book and we hit another winner! So this is the third one so far... the first two we picked to make were the Rosemary-Asiago Chop Bread and Sunny Citrus Squares.

Jeff loves rye bread, so when I saw that the recipe for Buttermilk-Rye Bread was actually a quick bread using baking powder and baking soda instead of yeast, I quickly made sure we had everything on hand and went to work.

Using just a couple bowls, this was quite fast to throw together this morning. Whole rye flour, bread flour and the leaveners are stirred together and combined with buttermilk, molasses, an egg, orange zest, caraway seeds and melted butter. Once poured into the pan and whisked into the oven, this bread bakes up into a beautiful caramel colored loaf. After sufficiently cooling down and sliced, the flavor of this is dark and robust from the molasses with just a hint of orange lingering in the background. The caraway seeds add that traditional mild anise flavor you find in rye breads with the buttermilk adding moisture, tenderness and a slight tang. This earned Jeff's stamp of approval as far as rye breads go - it gets mine as well because of the little prep time compared to some we have done before.

Dinner tonight, Gnocchi Gratin, takes some help from the market with some pre-made gnocchi. Once the gnocchi are cooked, a luscious smooth cheese sauce is started by melting butter and adding a bit of flour. Milk and broth are streamed in and allowed to bubble away until thick - even though I did whisk this in pretty slow, I still ended up with some lumps. To solve that, I just took our immersion blender and buzzed them away. After thickening, earthy Gruyere easily concedes to the heat and melts into the creamy sauce. Chives are added for a mild touch of onion with bacon lending a smoky flavor. The gnocchi are added in and this mixture is poured into a baking dish. Sharp Parmesan is scattered on top and this mixture bakes away until bubbly and the top becomes a light golden. The original recipe did call for a 22 ounce package of gnocchi, but I only found ones that were around 16 ounces. I just used one instead of splitting up two packages. As a result, I think our mixture was a little more creamy - but we both found that as a good thing and would use that amount again. This turned into a more comfort food-like dish than we thought it would be - kind of like a big potato casserole, but with an adult flare. We did find it a little difficult to try and capture this as a picture though!

Recipes
Gnocchi Gratin
Buttermilk-Rye Bread