After one year and 104 recipes, I finished the Brooks Bakes Bread Project on March 27, 2012. You can still find me baking and cooking at my new blog, Tangled Up In Food.

Archives: 21 March 2012

Pumpernickel Bread I
March 21, 2012

by stacy
Published on: March 21, 2012
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“This is an extremely interesting bread, but since it is practical to make only in large quantity, I recommend it solely to those of you who have large kitchens and large bowls.  Besides this, the dough is very sticky and takes a lot of deft working to get it to the baking stage.  So if you have any reservations about this challenge, I urge you to try another pumpernickel.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread

Since I don’t have a large kitchen or a large bowl, and harbored some strong reservations, Pumpernickel Bread has been a recipe that I’ve put off until the bitter end.

Ingredients:

Pumpernickel Bread I Ingredients

I used prepared instant mashed potatoes.

There is a lot of set up to this recipe.  You have to proof your yeast, make mashed potatoes, and prepare a cornmeal mush.  While I  was working on the potatoes and cornmeal, my yeast ended up looking like this:

Proofing Yeast

But I finally finished all of the beginning preparations, mixed in an ungodly amount of flour, and manhandled a huge mass of sticky dough into semi-submission.  I let the dough rise until it had exploded out of my not-large-enough bowl, and then formed it into three loaves.  This was difficult, because somehow my dough had reverted back to its sticky state while rising.  I ended up with one 8 x 4 loaf and two 9 x 5 loaves.

Pumpernickel Bread I After Second Rising

Once they had doubled in size, my loaves went into the oven at 425 degrees for 10 minutes and 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Pumpernickel Bread I

Pumpernickel Bread I is delicious–it is more of a rye bread than a pumpernickel, with only a hint of caraway.  Best of all, it made some very tasty Reuben sandwiches with leftover corn beef from St. Patrick’s Day.

Reuben Sandwich with Pumpernickel Bread I

Despite my reservations and small kitchen, I was up to the challenge.

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About the Baker
I'm a paralegal living and working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Besides baking, blogging, and eating bread, I love knitting and enjoying the Minnesota outdoors. My husband, Mike, is the Brooks Bakes Bread website developer, bread photographer, and chief taste tester.
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