Bread success!

[elfs]

Ha! I made bread again. And this time, it's perfect. I got one moderately healthy boule out of it, and I have to disagree with Mark Bittman (author of How to Cook Everything) about the need for the dough to be so wet as to be almost unmanagable at the beginning of kneading. This time, I used a slightly different ratio a flour to water and it worked fine.

The real tricks were simple: I activated the yeast ahead of time by putting it in with the hot water and let it stand for five minutes while I sifted the flour. While the recipe I have doesn't mention activating the yeast, it really did the trick with respect to rising times. And the recipe assumes that all flour is pre-sifted, but I've found that to not alway be the case. I used Red Mill Bread Flour, which I've found is really nice and, oddly enough, bread machine yeast, which worked fine once I hit their website and looked up the ratio (one packet == 2 1/4 teaspoons)-- only to discover that it was on the yeast bottle anyway.

I didn't use cooking spray on the rising bowl as the recipe said-- instead, I lined it with a lightly floured canvas sheet, which made punching it down and turning it out really easy. And I didn't just plop it down onto the baking sheet. Instead, I rolled the rim under boule-fashion, making a taller ball of dough with a pocket of air underneath, and then left it on a lightly-floured pizza spatula and covered it again with the canvas sheet for the second rise. When it had risen, I mixed up an egg-white and a teaspoon of water and glazed the bread with it. The pizza spatula made sliding it into the pre-heated oven (and baking stone) easy.

I think my oven is a little hot, so I set in for 425 instead of 450. 20 minutes later, I took out the most beautiful loaf of bread I've ever made, thin-crusted and golden. I pulled out a batch of pre-mixed dip (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, minced basil and coarsely ground pepper) from the 'fridge and... sigh. It's delicious.

And it really didn't take that much work. The only sad thing is that neither of my daughters wanted to help. Kouryou-chan, the three-year-old, is oddly cranky today. She didn't sleep well last night, although I'm not sure why. Usually she loves the sifting and measuring. And Yamaarashi-chan, at five, was still a little freaked out from how sticky her fingers got last time and declined to help knead it.

Of course, they're both perfectly willing to help eat it.

I have to try a few variations-- maybe steaming it a bit for a chewier crust, and trying blends of flour, like whole wheat or khamut with the hard white.

But next week, if I'm not too busy, I'll be making pretzels. Real ones, boiled in water with some baking soda before it goes into the oven.

Really cool kitchen gadget: the Misto. How did I ever live without this thing? Mistos are hand-pumped spray bottles that deliver a nice mist of whatever you put into them, even olive oil. While I didn't use it on the bread, it did help in making grilled cheese sandwiches with olive-oil instead of butter for the toast. Kouryou-chan loved it. Yamaarashi-chan had a tuna fish sandwich-- with minced onions and red bell peppers and a splash of mirin for sweetness.

Comments

Now I feel like a slacker...

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

I'm such a wuss when it comes to homemade bread. I adore my bread machine. :)

Yes, I've made bread by hand. It's more of a bitch than I care for, and I'm not sure my hands will stand up to kneading anymore. *bleah*

Re: Now I feel like a slacker...

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you have anything wrong with your hands, like RSI, kneading dough is obviously not the thing to do. I found the mixing to be trivial and all-- for me, it was mostly a matter of experimenting with recipes until I found one that I liked.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

For a chewy french-bread style crust, use no oil or fat whatsoever in the preparation, let the bread stand covered in a thin cloth to cool overnight, and *then* put it in a sealed container or ziplock bag.

It has to be sealed after eight or so hours, or it turns into a brick, because *all* the water dries out. However, if you leave it out for a controlled amount of time and then seal it up, it ends up with a chewy crust and still moist inside.

It must be eaten quickly, but this is rarely a problem. My recipe for this is 2 cups of water, 2.25 tsp of yeast, plus a bit of salt and sugar to proof it, then enough flour. I let it rise twice for a more even texture.

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Ah, How To Cook Everything. I very much like that book. As a novice cook, I find it much easier to use than the other cookbooks available in my parents' household, such as Joy of Cooking. It's also very interesting to read the non-recipe sections. I should pick up my own copy for when I move out of the dorms next year.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

We've found that Bittman doesn't get everything right. His bread section may work for him, but it wasn't until I found the bread recipies in Cooking Light that things started to work for me. His segments on shellfish are also a little twonky. But his pancake recipies are spot on, absolutely, as are his instructions on making the perfect meatloaf (roundloaf, drip pan, bacon shell). omahas and I have been subscribers to Cooking Light (http://www.cookinglight.com) for a long time and we've really appreciated every lesson in them.