My New Favorite Bread

It is not exactly bread-baking season (especially given that I live on a second floor apartment where it gets sweltering in the summer), but I had been fixated on the idea of eating an orange rye bread for a while, so on Saturday evening, when the temperature seemed deceptively cool (outside), I decided to whip out my Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book and give their orange-rye recipe a try.

I've had this wonderful cookbook for years, and as with many cookbooks, I have my stock favorites. I tend to make probably the same 10 recipes over and over again, while there are others that I have yet to make. In fact, I could probably plot a nicely skewed bell curve of the frequency with which I make the various breads in this cookbook.

I made the orange-rye a while back, precisely to break this habit/skewed bell curve pattern and ended up liking the bread and wondering why I hadn't made it all of these years.

Thus, here I was at a too-late-to-start-making-bread hour poring over my Laurel's Bread Book, debating whether to go through with it and bake this bread that I had been fixating over for the past two weeks.
However, while pondering over this and resolving to make the bread after all, another recipe for a honey-spiced rye on the opposite page caught my eye. I compared the ingredients and decided that the latter had more interesting stuff (honey, almonds, lots of interesting spices, orange rind, as opposed to just orange rind and honey for the orange-rye recipe), and made that instead. It calls for a 1/2 cup of almonds, but since I didn't have enough almonds, I also added toasted hazelnuts to the mix.

It called for a mere "pinch" of anise seed, but I added 1 tsp of caraway seed. (The next time I make it, I plan to increase this by another teaspoon.)

The other modification I made to the original recipe was to chop up slightly chunkier bits of orange peel (boil or soak in hot water to slightly soften) than the recipe called for.

Unfortunately, I didn't put it in the oven till 11-ish, so I didn't get to try it till the following morning, but I liked it so much, I think I must've devoured a third of the loaf in just a day.

For the time being, I've dubbed it my new favorite bread. Well, ok, favorite "quick" bread.