Fresh Bread
I decided I got X this KitchenAid mixer for Christmas…we might as well use it more often. Seems like as good as any a time to figure out how to make bread. I always thought it would be need to bake your bread for the week on Sunday morning or whatever.
Here’s the result:
This is a basic white bread recipe and it was much easier than you may think. It’s water, flour, sugar, salt and yeast. This recipe seemed like a good fundamental sort of “master this and then modify it” one. I mostly use recipes as guidelines With the help of the stand mixer, it’s not particularly hard work. The process is somewhat long (about 3 hours) but I’d estimate that only about 20 minutes of that time requires any actual interaction. The rest of the time is just leaving the dough alone while it rises and bakes.
Some gotchas…I may have added too much flour. The recipe called for 4 rounded cups of flour, which I pre-measured into a bowl. I added flour until the texture seemed good. It wasn’t sticking to the mixing bowl and it wasn’t climbing the dough hook. But there was still a lot of flour left, so I added some more. I still had close to a cup left in the bowl when I finally decided that any more flour would make it into a rock…if that hadn’t already happened.
Then, when I left the dough to rise, I really don’t think it “doubled” in size. Perhaps because it was too much flour, perhaps because I halfassed starting the yeast by not bothering to actually measure the water temp.
But after letting the dough rise for an hour, you might as well finish the job, so I shaped 2 small loaves, let them rise for another 45 minutes and just tossed them in the oven.
And they came out fine. If the dough is denser then it should be, I think I like bread dense. It didn’t smush when being cut, and I was able to make a PB&J sandwich without it falling apart on me.
Here’s to breaking new culinary grounds!