I baked bread quite a while ago, but haven’t gotten around to posting, mostly because I kept forgetting to take my pictures off the camera. I also, incidentally, forgot to take many pictures. But there are a few.
In my ever snowballing quest to stop buying any and all food at the grocery store, one of the lingering difficulties was bread. Not because I find baking challenging, or unappealing, because it is actually one of my favorite things, but because I wanted bread for sandwiches. And especially for toast. My favorite breakfast, presuming I’m not having a full out breakfast with biscuits and fried potatoes and the rest, is good, hearty toast with peanut butter and jam. And I had never found a bread recipe that would make a sandwich bread that would hold up to the toaster.
For a while I survived on farmer’s market bread, but unfortunately, the people who sell the good toasting bread at our farmer’s market are in college and have lives which do not allow them to be at the farmer’s market every weekend. Plus the farmer’s market ends at Thanksgiving. And then what? No bread?? This is unacceptable.
So finally, after receiving a beautiful pizza stone for Christmas (thanks mom) and finding this likely sounding recipe from foodiefarmgirl, I decided to try it. I kept putting it off because it requires being at home for long enough to let it rise in several successions and beat it down each time, and so intended to do it on the weekend of the first (second? third?) big snow. Only I hadn’t accounted for snowball fights. In the morning, trying to time the rises with the time I would be outside building forts with my friends and the ten year olds that live on our block, I set to work, mixing, kneading, flouring, and got something like this:
It made me really, really want a giant wooden bread bowl, which will be my next purchase. Trying to mix three loaves of bread in my otherwise perfect vintage mixing bowl is a bit of a challenge. Kneading, though. If you have never kneaded bread, you are missing out. It is one of the most satisfying activities I know of. Standing at your kitchen counter with the rising scent of yeast, your hands buried in a warm ball of dough, fighting the air trapped inside, pushing it down, turning, pushing again, over and over, becomes a meditative reverie. The sun pours through the window, casting a thousand rainbows through the thick arms of the icicles, and you are transported: nothing matters but the dough beneath your hands.
Until your cell goes off and you are called outside to more pressing pursuits. Needless to say, my first major bread experience (by which I mean attempt to make bread with more than one rise) was interrupted several times, and I sneakily put the dough in the fridge for a few hours to make sure it wouldn’t over rise while I was outside building a fort. I wasn’t sure if this would ruin the bread, halting the rise and then trying to get it started again by putting the dough on top of the radiator, but it seems to have survived.
I also didn’t realize that after I made the loaves, I was supposed to let it rise AGAIN. At this point it was almost dinner time and I had been invited over for hot cider (and rum) and was hoping to make the loaves, stick them in the oven, and run back before the cider was gone. Instead I made the loaves, ran over for cider while they rose, and cut my cider drinking short because the final rise is not meant to last very long. At that point I finally put them on the sort of half-assed warmed stone (the inaugural use! and I of course didn’t realize it would take so long to preheat), and put them in the oven. There is no photographic evidence of this event.
But in the end, I came up with this:
The most beautiful bread I have ever seen in my life. And this is one of the loaves that came out of the freezer, because I forgot to take pictures of the first one. It slices like magic, holds together perfectly (the crust has a slight tendency to break apart on the defrosted loaves), and can fit right in the toaster (presuming I cut it properly- thank god for giant bread knives).
I made it with half and half wheat and white flour, but next time I might just use wheat. And maybe throw some whole grains in there. I am used to a bread that is a good bit heavier than this turns out. I used good coarse sea salt instead of regular table salt, and I think that made a big difference. Or, at least, in every couple bites you get a nice sharp taste of salt and I really enjoy that in my bread. I am a big fan of bread that has a lot of taste to it, sandwich bread or otherwise. I’d like to be able to sit there and just eat a slice if I felt like it.
And so, about a month later, and a lot of toast and hummus sandwiches later, I finished the last of the three loaves this morning, and thought I should probably get around to that posting thing.
Now I just have to wait for my next bag of flour to come from the co-op.
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