Beet & Squid Ink Bread

Did you know you can *easily* buy squid ink in the Mission?? I bought two little packets of the stuff for $2 at Lucca! The only hard part was getting the attention of the very nice gentlemen behind the counter....



So my driving interest in baking at the moment is visuals. I want something that looks awesome. I also want something that'll taste awesome-- as in crazy. My friend Mikey is fantastic at making delicious things-- which he documents over at his blog. In fact, I'd say my sudden urge for baking came from him- the fine fellow had a fun sandwich party which featured sandwich rolls made by him. Crazy good.

However-- I'm only interested at the moment in making things I can't buy....



Squid ink was chosen for my upcoming need for very black dinner food. The beets were chosen because I have grown to *love* beets at restaurants and I had a whispering memory of my friend Mel making tasty beet cupcakes...

All the recipes for squid ink bread out there on the internet were way over my head. There are a number of beet bread recipes and this one over at Taste For Adventure appealed to me the most.

My modifications (intentional or not) were as such:

I only had 1 cup of beets instead of 1.5 cups

I totally forgot to add the oil in the bread. Oops

Only added 1 tsp of salt to the mix to start with

Before adding the beet puree I eyeballed separating out 1/3 of the dough and putting it aside

Added the puree to the 2/3 portion. Never added more salt to it

Mixed ~1/2 the ink packet with 1/3? cup water then added it to the 1/3 portion. Waaay to wet. Added more flour and also some extra salt randomly

After letting it rest for an hour I divided the beet portion in half.

15 minutes after that I took one of the beet portions, rolled it out (poorly), rolled out the ink dough (poorly) and then sorta hackishly twisted them together. Let everything rest another 30 min

I feel the resulting bread was extremely satisfactory. The squid ink preformed ok visually (I need a darker black for my dinner party though) but had very little taste. The beet looked great and had a very distinctive & pleasant taste. Yay beets!



It should be noted that I was compelled to start this randomly one Monday night and the bread didn't get out of the oven until 12:37am. Lame. Had some at night, and then more in the morning. The half of twisted loaf that was left was brought to work and consumed-- amusing to me that it actually wasn't vegetarian safe. The beet only loaf was brought to work the day after and consumed (little to no negative side effects for being a day old! Win!).

So... yeah... there's that...