Baking Bread

Frankly, it’s a lot easier than you think it is and it kind of makes me wonder why I pay $5 at the farmer’s market for a 1lb loaf of bread. Since I haven’t bought a loaf from Grace’s Bakery at the farmer’s market in almost a year, it was time to give it a try. (Plus the yeast sock puppets on Alton Brown’s Good Eats show make me laugh.)

I’ve made one batch of About.com’s Master Bread Dough recipe. It’s nothing to be afraid of.

The top 3 things that scare me about baking bread:

1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise.

2. Overkneading.

3. Impatience.

I’ve had some bad experience in Home EC as a kid so I always thought yeast bread was hard to make. But one of my close friends made yeast bread in the dorm kitchen all the time for awesome late-night bread and honey snacks. All of these fears can be overcome fairly easily.

1. Killing the yeast so the bread doesn’t rise: The recipe I used says heat the milk, water and butter till there are bubbles around the edges, which is how people did it before they had home thermometers. But don’t be stupid like me, just BUY AND USE a thermometer and don’t add the yeast if it’s more than 130 degrees F. Trust the recipe. I heated the mixture till there were little bubbles on the edges and it worked just fine.

2. Overkneading: If the recipe says knead it 20 times, or 10 times or 5 times, do just that. If it says knead for 8-10 minutes, do it just for 8. If you want to knead bread for therapy, make a separate batch or divide your recipe in half since many recipes are for 4+ loaves. (NO KIDDING! I read like 10 recipes before I found one for just two loaves, i.e. the recipe above.)

3. Impatience: Ah Grasshopper. This is what timers and internet surfing is for. Give it at least an hour to rise on the second rising, but the dough is forgiving here. Often recipes say to let the dough rise till it’s doubled. But I’ve found it’s actually up to me. I can put the bread on the counter and run a few errands. I can put it on the fridge and get slightly shorter rising time. Or I can put it on the front porch in Sunday afternoon heat and get an even shorter rising time (like 30-45 minutes).

Some other notes:

1. I used Silk Vanilla Soy Milk because we ran out of regular cow’s milk. This is premium soy milk that we usually don’t have at the house. We usually buy Rice or Soy Dream. But the enriched soy milk and extra vanilla flavor was alright. There was no gross vanilla flavor on the bread, just a hint of sweetness that was good for sandwiches and for French toast. (yum!)

2. Time is your most expensive ingredient. I made the recipe knowing I would only make 1 loaf and freeze the other half. That was fine for me. I had a bad headache last week and came home early in the afternoon. It was enough time to make a loaf of bread for dinner. I had no idea when I’d bake the second loaf. I thawed it out in the fridge on Saturday night into Sunday morning. I thought I’d wake up early and have fresh bread for Sunday brunch. But I didn’t wake till after noon and we left the house to hit the farmer’s market. Instead I shaped the dough and put it ON the fridge before we left. When we returned, the dough was still cold and hadn’t risen. I put it outside with a tea towel on top. In the heat of the day, it rose 75% in 30 minutes. Because I was pressed for time to complete another errand before dark, I baked it without the full doubling, but the texture of the bread was equal to that of the first loaf.

How cheap was it? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. But if Sistah Ant’s statistic of $3.30 a loaf is any indicator, then it was damned cheaper to make my own. Everyone keeps flour, sugar, and salt around. I’m sure it’s not hard to have some milk and eggs either unless you’re vegan. (eew.). If you make a grocery list, getting some yeast at the supermarket can’t be too hard. Remember, a lot of recipes are also for multiple loaves, not just one. So even if I spent the equivalent of $3.30 on ingredients for this recipe, I got two loaves at $1.65 each which were tasty and delicious. (As of this week, Hodgson’s Mill yeast was 52 cents a packet or 3 for a dollar at their website. But I have a preference for Fleischmann’s. I feel like the packets have a longer shelf life.)

The other thing is that I’m much more inclined to eat the whole loaf if I make the bread myself. Often in the summer heat, cheap bread goes moldy on me before I can eat it all. I can assure you that every crumb of my two loaves was eaten and never had a chance to grow mold.

My next experiment in bread baking will be with whole wheat.