Make my own bread

I dug out The Book of Bread which I either stole from my Dad many years ago (copyright is 1982) or picked up mad cheap at a used bookstore when I thought I wanted to cook bread a million years ago but never did. You pick as either option is probably equally good at this point.

You may be asking yourself, oat flour? Or not. Either way, I made my own by pulverizing oats in my spice grinder (okay, it’s a coffee grinder I use for spices and keep very clean). Tah-dah! Here are the ingredients:

salt, yeast, milk, butter, currants, oat flour, maple syrup, bread flour, all purpose flour and whole wheat flour (warm water not pictured)

To start, the water and yeast is dissolved in a bowl. In the meantime, the milk, butter and salt is heated over the stove until butter is melted and salt is dissolved:

Once I’m sure the heated mixture is lukewarm, I mix it in with the yeast. From this point, I mix in the oat flour, bread flour, wheat flour and maple syrup. The object is to mix everything together and then add the all-purpose flour until it becomes hard to stir:

The dough is sticky, but no longer stirable. I knead it carefully until it forms a decent ball:

At this point, it’s rise number one. Recipe calls for an hour, but I’m using quick-rise, so I check in half an hour – it’s looking good:

All that’s really left is to knead in the dried cranberries. I do this by using the envelope method of kneading and just sprinkling in a few cranberries each time I fold:

At this point, I’ve separated the dough into two pieces so I can form it into two loaves. I put these into greased pans and let them rise. They’re simply supposed to double and I let it go about half an hour:

At this point, my bread bakes 45 minutes and smells great. The maple and the whole wheat smell fill the house. There isn’t a ton of spring, but between the oat and wheat flour, I’m not super surprised. When I cut into it, though, I get a great-looking loaf. I also get a really soft bread. Husband has been snacking on it like a crazed man. I’m trying to hold back and be sane:

Well, first the bad news – the KitchenAid has suffered defeat. Last week, when making a second batch of pizza dough (at the very end!), a bad sound was made. A very bad sound and we opened it up to find that the worm gear stripped. Carnage can be witnessed here:

It looks worse than it is because of their industrial grease, but parts are on order. Le sigh.

This meant seeking out more by-hand stuff. You know, because people actually do make bread by hand. For serious. I heard about it once from this friend of a friend. ;) Flipping through Savory Baking from the Mediterranean, I find a recipe for French Country Bread. Not only is it mixed by hand, but it has 3 ingredients – 4 if you count water in various forms. I decide to try this today.

Ingredients:

Yeast, flour, water and salt. That’s it, I promise no one isn’t pictured – well, unless you count ice cubes during baking. But they’re still water. But that’s it.

There is a trick to this – it’s making a poolish which is just a fancy word for gooey yeast sponge. Basically, mix step #1 is a little bit of flour, water and the yeast:

It has a sort of “paper mache paste out waaay to long” consistency to it, but you mix it up, cover it and set it aside. Instructions say 3 hours, but I’m using fast-rise yeast, so I check it in an hour and 45 – I’m good to go. It looked like bubbly pancake batter.

Now, it’s just salt, flour, the poolish and a little more water. The trick is to fold in the poolish carefully and mix it until you have a sticky dough. There did come a point where I needed to mix the last bit by hand (carefully – I didn’t want to kill all the yeast bubbles by pulverizing the dough) so I could knead the sticky mess:

Kneading this isn’t actually as bad as one thinks it might be. Yes, it’s sticky, but I’m generous with the flour and I take the “letter” approach. basically, I push out the flour gently with the heel of my hand so I can pull up the dough and fold the top towards the middle and then fold the bottom up over the top like I was folding a letter. I then repeat the process in opposite directions. This kneading gets me a much smoother dough.

The instructions are clear, though, they want you to knead in two steps. Just a few minutes to smooth, rest for 15 minutes and then knead to elastic. Since the dough is still somewhat damp-ish, I follow the recipe advice and cover it with it’s mixing bowl to save it from drying out. My dough does look nicely kneaded when I’m done:

I promise that was actually a fresh bowl in the last shot. I added flour while it went through a rise. Again, fast-acting yeast means the recommended hour was cut to 30 minutes:

At this point, I form this into my round loaf (just a quick knead and form). There’s now another round of rising – this time under a damp towel. I’ve moved this over to my pizza peel because that’s how the bread is going to be transferred to my now-warming oven (with pizza stone in it). The rise went mostly up and only a little out, so it doesn’t look all that dramatic (1 hour cut to 30 minutes again):

I’m now ready for the final touches. First, scoring. If you look closely, you can see that my “light hand” got a wee bit heavy in the back. I’ve dusted my top. I’ve also got a cake pan that’s been heating on my bottom rack in the oven along with the pizza stone on the middle rack. Here’s my prep:

As I put this in a 450 degree oven, I throw the ice cubes in the hot cake pan and slam the oven door shut – instant steam! I know it’s no substitute for a steam injected oven, but I’m not a bajillionaire, so it’s what I’ve got. I bake at that temperature for 15 minutes and then lower it to 350 for 35 minutes. I get this:

You can see how it continued to poof up. You could also hear it “crackle” as it cooled out on the counter. It was a wonderful sound. After it cooled, we cut in and got this:

It was fluffy and hearty, but not heavy. The crust from the steam had developed this lovely chewiness to it. It was great stuff. Time consuming, yes, but great stuff when you realize this was just flour, water, yeast and salt.

That’s right! So this month’s Bon Appetit comes and the ingredient of the month is Yukon Gold potatoes. They have this recipe for Yukon Gold Cinnamon Rolls and seeing as how husband loves anything with cinnamon and sugar and obsesses over Yukon Gold potatoes (he worships Alton Brown, Alton loves the Yukon gold, yada yada) – well, I had to try them. So this morning, I was up early and started the cinnamon rolls.

The ingredients:

Pictured – Yukon gold potatoes, 3 packages yeast, kosher salt, butter, sugar, eggs, all-purpose flour, brown sugar, powdered sugar. Not pictured: Water, cinnamon, milk and vanilla.

Well, first things first – potatoes:

I boil the potatoes in 2 cups of water with a tablespoon of salt until tender (about 20 minutes). Then I mash directly in the pan with the water. Add a stick of butter, mash some more. At this point, the instructions say to add the 3 eggs to the potatoes, but they’re really hot, so I add about 1/2 a cup of the potatoes to the eggs first to heat up the egg mixture before dumping it into the potatoes. Then I add and whisk the bejebus out of the potatoes and eggs. If that weren’t enough whisking, I add a cup of flour to the potatoes and whisk some more. At this point, they taste like salty potato butter!

At this point, I’m supposed to let the potatoes sit and cool down. In the meantime, I pour the yeast into the mixer bowl with warm water and sugar for the ten minutes I’m letting the potatoes cool. Guess how much fizz 3 packets of yeast produces:

Food science is fun, isn’t it? Onto making potatoes into flour – this is not going to turn into the most solid dough ever. In fact, it will be sticky, but the mixer will do the bulk of the work. The first part involves mixing our yeast and potatoes together. The second is mixing in 3 cups of flour until we get a sticky dough:

The rest of the mixing is done by hand – there aren’t a lot of photos because this was sticky. Let’s just say that it was a lot of patient folding and adding of flour to get a dough that held together fairly well. Once I was done, I loaded it into a bowl to let it rise for half an hour. You might notice that it went a little bonkers in the photo:

While waiting, I made the filling. Brown sugar, flour and butter. the recipe suggested using a fork, I like using my pastry cutter for any job involving cutting in sticks of butter:

At this point, it’s time for construction – the dough is still a bit sticky, so I flour the heck out of my counter and have faith that it will be enough. In rolling out the dough, I’m getting bubbles throughout the dough – it’s still trying to rise! I power through and manage to get my square-ish dough. All that’s left is to spread the filling and cut the dough into 12 pieces. This isn’t as easy as it sounds and the instructions to “flour the knife” are silly (smooth knife dipped into flour did not stick). I make do. We let the rolls rise for a bit before baking, hoping that they won’t completely take over the pan:

Husband is up at this point (convenient, no?). He does make the icing (powdered sugar, melted butter, vanilla, kosher salt and milk) while the rolls bake, so he did help out. They bake up huge (“Cinnabon Size!” husband said more than once) and halfway through cooling, I ice then so that the icing can melt a bit over the rolls:

As to the reaction? Well, husband has had THREE of these so far today. I had one already and it was great! Fluffy and moist and no hint of mashed potato at all. These were involved, but I’d gladly make these again.

Close up of the crumb (because that’s what the bread-types dig):

So, there was some experimentation in the last few weeks with wild yeast, but the cold weather hasn’t been cooperating and I really wanted to get back to some bread making. Alton Brown to the rescue!

He did a show on homemade pretzels – you know the kind, the soft chewy kind you get at the mall for too much money. And I saw the show and the recipe and I said, I can do that! So I went to the food network’s site and I grabbed the recipe and got to work.

You know the routine by now! The ingredients:

An egg, sugar and salt, yeast, all-purpose flour, melted butter, water and baking soda. Not pictured: vegetable oil.

So Alton’s all into proofing the yeast. I follow his instructions and throw the water with the salt and sugar into the bowl and the yeast on top. Five minutes later – bubbling:

Now it’s all about letting the machine do the work. I add the melted butter and the flour. You may notice Alton’s recipe does specify flour by weight. I actually do have a scale where I can zero out my mixing bowl with ingredients, so I’m able to pour 22 ounces of flour exactly. From here, I let the mixer do it’s thing for 5 minutes until the dough is nice and ready:

Rising time. Recipe calls for an hour, but this is fast-acting – in 30 minutes, I’m more than doubled:

I tear this into 8 pieces and lightly oil my counter so I can roll these into ropes and form them into pretzel shapes. I’ll admit that it’s not as supple as I’m expecting it to be, but that’s okay. While I do this, I have water boiling on the stove and the oven preheating:

Hint from me to you – do put in the baking soda while the water is hot – if you think you see white crusty stuff on the sides of the pot, you do. I added the baking soda while the water was boiling and got a mini-science experiment. Luckily no spillover, but I laughed. I basically boiled each pretzel for 30 seconds and scooped it out with a wire scoop (this gives the pretzel texture):

At this point, I give the pretzels an egg wash and bake them for 13 minutes. Look what I get:

If you’re wondering – but is it a chewy, doughy piece of pretzel goodness? Well – take a look at this crumb:

Yes, this is good stuff. :)

This is the most complicated bread that I’ve made to date – and the one that’s making me think, “I’m a FREAKING bread maker!” This was intimidating mostly in that this is a two day process. Yes – TWO days to make bread.

Step 1 involves making a Biga – it’s a sort of starter sponge. Get a load of the ingredients:

Yes, Rye Flour, Unbleached All-Purpose Flour, Bread Flour AND Whole Wheat Flour. The Yeast and Water are a whole different thing, as you dissolve a small amount of yeast in the water and then take a smaller amount of that to mix in with the flours so you get 1/364th (or something like that) of a teaspoon of yeast.

I know! So you mix all of this with a small amount of water that seems like it won’t soak up all the flour. It makes this stiff ball and you let it rise for 24 hours:

Honestly, this didn’t do anything for well over twelve hours and then it was mostly husband and I going, “I think it’s done something,” looking at digital pictures of the original biga and saying, “I’m almost certain it’s done something?” By the time the 24 hours was up, it had tripled.

At this point, it’s more ingredients:

The biga, salt, yeast, flour (only one kind) and water. I’m happy to be using my mixer, as it’s all about mixing these together to make a sort of very liquidy dough:

Now for more fun. This has to rise – but every 20 minutes (save the last 30 minutes) of my 2 hour rise time is spent dumping out my mixture onto my well-floured counter and folding the dough up like a letter. This gets more flour into the dough and keeps distributing the gasses. There’s no heavy-duty kneading. And the dough really gets easier to handle.

Once that’s done, I cut the dough in half with a dough scraper – carefully. More careful folding of the dough and a rise. Then a quick flip and smoosh of the bread with my fingers – you can actually see how this allows the yeasties to rise all through the bread in these steps – there are bubbles everywhere:

At this point, I’m feeling pretty good. The biga didn’t die, the dough went from soup to supple and all I have to do is bake it on my pizza stone on some parchment paper:

Poof – these are two lovely loaves! And they look all old-school artisan (they are from the book my MIL got me for Christmas on artisan breads). Look at what they look like when you cut into them:

Woo!

We still have 1 loaf left – we made this Sunday. It’s been really, really good. Chewy, tasty and flavorful. For all the work, I really see myself making this one again!

One of the books we decided to own after getting it from the library was Flatbreads & Flavors because it pretty much represented a dream job – travel the world, try all sorts of wonderful food and write a book about it (all while getting paid). It isn’t just bread, it’s a lot of things, but tonight we decided to try a Georgian (as in former Russian Republic) bread.

The Cheese Boat breads are a sort of cheese pie, pizza, snack thingy that I can’t wait to try again and again. As we ate these, husband and I probably came up with about ten different ways to tweak these – not the least of which will be using fresh herbs from the garden!

The usual – our ingredients:

Pictured: Gruyere cheese, goat cheese, plain yogurt, yeast, salt, flour, olive oil – not pictured – pinch of sugar and water. By the by, what’s up with sugar of late? With the new baking thing, I’ve been forced to buy my first bag of sugar in I don’t know how long. Grocery has it on sale – YAY! But it’s shrunk to 4lbs, BOO! Well, when husband goes to second grocer (yes, he’s one of those shoppers, but it does pay off), he informs me that name-brand fancy-pants 5lb sugar was nearly 4x the cost of the 4lb sale sugar. There’s some craziness in the white sugar world as far as I can tell…

Anywho, Flatbreads folks are very into the “stir 100 times fast” to build a gluten, so this is another by hand number – basically there’s only so far I can go before I get my hands dirty and it is this far:

At this point, it’s about ten minutes of kneading until I have a nice dough. I add a little more flour to it, but not a great deal. It’s a nice, light dough that I set aside for about an hour and a half of rising – which it MORE than does:

At this point, I’m just supposed to cut my dough in half, form it into oblong patties and set them aside:

This is because it’s time to concentrate on the cheese. Yogurt, Gruyere and goat cheese are mixed together into something resembling “smooth” which is odd since Gruyere is supposed to be coarsely grated:

Now for the fun part – forming of the boat. Basically, roll out the dough to a nice oval until it’s about 1/4” thick. Spread cheese mixture in the middle and then out to within about an inch of the edges. Roll edges inward and then pinch ends so they resemble a boat shape:

In case you’re wondering, that’s my super-fancy homemade pizza peel made from scrap wood. Fancy! Who says that table saw with all sorts of fancy jigsaw features isn’t going to be totally necessary one day?

At this point, the boat goes into the oven on a hot pizza stone for about 15 minutes and voila:

I know! Look at my crumb:

Taste – GREAT. Apparently, the authors had this originally in a shop that served this exclusively with soft drinks. We can see how this and a carbonated beverage would be divine on a hot day. It was great on a winter day. The best part was the cheese – for three items that are normally have some bite to them, they all meld into this really lovely thing that tastes almost sweet.

This would be so much better than bread sticks, garlic bread or crostini for appetizers…it would go great with salads in that respect. Did I mention how good this was? :)

So my Dad got me this DK book for Christmas – simply called Bread – if you’ve had any of DK’s books, you know they’re all about photographs and great, simple instructions. So how couldn’t I make a traditional Italian Easter Bread with a Nut Brittle? Onto the usual -

The Ingredients:

Salt, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, yeast, butter, and what I think will be genius – Nut Glaze. Laugh at my genius now, for it is pure folly!

This actually requires preparation, so from all my years of watching cooking shows – mis en place action:

Eggs that have been beaten, 3 zested lemons and yest that’s been making friends with lukewarm milk.

Instead of my normal mixer, this is all done by hand – swear! Here’s the progression:

I will say having the smell of fresh lemon zest is rather nice – and let’s face it, you’re not exactly just letting it all go down the drain when it comes to washing your hands. :) Taste test! MMMM.

I even knead it by hand and it actually looks like dough from the KitchenAid, proving my theory that people made bread before electricity (I know!):

So, now to let everything rise – and to rest from quite a bit of activity!

After a successful rise comes the construction. To make the ring, it involves making dough ropes, intertwining them and actually getting the rope to a buttered parchment paper:

So the ring rises and I get to my folly – the shortcut nut brittle. See, this stuff was caramelized nuts and I figure, chop it up and bake it with this bread instead of making the stuff with just a little sugar and cinnamon – smart, right? See – here I am mixing it with egg yolk:

Hey – there’s my risen ring and I top it with my lovely egg-washed nut brittle and throw it into the 400 degree oven for 45 minutes, what could go wrong

I know, I know, you smarter cookies are already saying, “that prepackaged stuff is mostly caramel which is already burnt sugar – how much more heat do you think it could take, Steph?” Okay, so I wasn’t so bright:

But all was not lost – the BREAD portion was divine! Sweet, feathery and lemony – you can see the natural tear in the back and the spring in the crumb:

Hey, they can’t all be winners! ;)

So I decide I want to make these fluffy dinner rolls that will resemble Bob Evans rolls. I get sort of close with some odd steps in between and a few good ideas of where things might be corrected. But still, some tasty rolls!

First, the ingredients:

Flour, sugar, yeast, two eggs, milk, salt, shortening and butter for dunking.

I mixed everything except for the butter together until I had a dough I could work with – this did create quite a bit of dough:

At this point, I realize that I don’t need to bake the rolls for a while and that this is a single-rise recipe. “No problem!” I think to myself, “I shall just put the dough in the refrigerator to retard the rise.” I felt terribly clever. So very, very clever. Very clever until I pulled the dough out and looked at the result of my “retarded” rise:

Yeah…not so much. Well, I forged on and had to make the rolls anyway. I would have preferred a more controlled rise and this would have helped a bit, but I still did pretty well. At this point, I had a little assembly line where I formed the dough into rolls and dunked them into butter and put them on a baking sheet:

They took less than 25 minutes to bake up and were rather nice. My only complaint is that they were a bit crusty. Outside of that, they were dang tasty! Next time, I’ll start them closer to when I need to bake them so I don’t need to worry about trying to delay the rise and cooking with half cold dough:

On the upside, I did get two very nice books for Christmas on Bread – Bread from my Dad which is full of a lot of great simple recipes and Artisan Baking from my MIL which is full of fabulous advanced recipes I hope to try soon (I asked for that one specifically so double bonus points to her!). Recipes from both should appear throughout the year.

I’ve been looking for another success from The Fresh Loaf web site since working out my yeast issues, and I settled on their Flax Seed Wheat Bread since I still had flax seed to use in the house (that spice goal is going down, I swear!). I happen to have a kitchen scale, so the fact that the ingredients had to be weighed was no biggie – a few posts down, a user does give approximate measures.

So, first up, the ingredients:

The ingredients – water, bread flour, honey (instead of malt powder), whole wheat flour, flax seed, yeast and salt. This actually called for twice as much flax seed as wheat flour, so I’m left with about half the amount of flax seed as I had before I started this.

The mix was pretty straightforward:

The dough doesn’t ball up like other doughs – it appeared a bit stickier than most until I handled it. As soon as I handled it, it balled up immediately and was ready to rise.

So my first rise:

The perspective in the photos is different, but I promise there was decent rise in this first pass. The seeds are also making it difficult to see my “poke test” where I made sure that I could get a small indent to stick in the dough.

I formed a loaf with a little folding into a sort of torpedo and did a second rise:

I did not bake in this glass dish – I just did the rise in this dish. I baked it in an oven on a pizza stone, and got the following:

Delicious, hearty bread. We ate this plain, we ate this with butter and we even made a snack of this where I chopped some artichoke hearts, mixed them with some shredded cheese and hot pepper flakes – I sliced up some bread, threw the topping on, popped them under the broiler to melt the cheese and enjoyed!

Much thanks to JudithKD’s suggestion that I try her yogurt bread. I did and it was fantastic. She should know that husband has had at least 3 slices as an after dinner snack so far tonight and has remarked as to how easy it will be to make this again despite the fact that we made two loaves! Onward – and to try some new Photoshop Skillz (oh yeah, with a Z!).

First – her incredibly simple ingredient list:

Plain yogurt, yeast, honey, flour, water and salt. That’s it. If you want the original recipe check out her post. And give her tons of cheers for it!

So this is one of the first ones I don’t rely on the instant part of the yeast for – I get to make the bubbly goo of yeast – I could have probably gotten away without doing it, but I like the bubbly goo:

Now the tough part – mixing in 7 cups or so of flour to get this sucker into a workable dough. The yogurt makes this a bit more on the moist side, so this takes a while – and it sill looks a bit stickier than it actually is. Mad photoshop skillz ahead:

That’s my evolution of dough right there – I know the last one looks extra sticky, but it was quite easy to handle.

A little flour on my counter and I split the dough in half. I then formed the two pieces into loaves. To do this, I just went with the fold method – this lets me get rid of built up gasses gently and pop them gently into the greased bread pans – folding is exactly what it sounds like:

So, pop into pan and wait for rise:

The rise was actually higher, but if you look closely, you can see I’ve cut the top to help with the oven spring a bit, so I had a little deflation. No biggie.

Baking time – no photoshop magic – nice loaves. I wonder if I should have tried a little egg wash for more browning, but these look lovely:

Slicing, you can see a nice loaf – good slicing that’s not only a great bread, but a great snack. I’d be making my sandwich for lunch tomorrow on it if work weren’t providing lunch! :)

Thanks, JudithKD!