Thursday, June 11, 2009

Adventures in Breadmaking

This week I decided I would try my hand at baking my own bread. Bread consumption in our household varies from week to week. Some weeks we fly through a loaf, other weeks it gets forgotten until its just a loaf of green mold. This week however we went through it quite quickly. I had bought some yeast beforehand knowing I wanted to try homemade bread sometime. So I figure this is a better time than ever.

I used this No-Knead Bread recipe I found online. I don't have a bread maker so I wanted to find the simplest bread making recipe I could. I didn't have any bread flour on hand, but after a quick check on yahoo answers, I learned that regular all-purpose flour would be okay. It will taste the same, just a bit more dense. I mixed the ingredients and tucked it away overnight. The recipe says you can wait as little as four hours, but I did this right before bed.

The next day, you could tell the yeast was doing its thing, but it seemed rather wet to me still and against my better judgement I dumped it on the counter top thinking it would be okay to start kneading it. Man on man was I wrong. It was way more liguidy (making up my own words) than I thought and it ran all over the counter top. So Carmen helped me thrown LOADS of flour in it until it thickened up. Also, it smelled kind of funny while baking. I was looking forward to the smells of fresh bread baking, but it unfortunately had a fishy type smell? I have no idea how that worked out or why my dough was extra runny...either way it ended up looking and more importantly tasting fine :)

Its more of a rustic type bread, very crunchy and crispy outside. I would think it would go nice as dinner bread to have with steak or pasta. I was honestly looking for a recipe that would be more so for a regular loaf of bread that we could cut up and use for sandwiches. As I said, despite some minor setbacks, it was still edible. I guess I'll keep practicing and keep my eye out for a more loaf-like bread recipe. If you all know of any, please pass them on!

5 comments:

UK lass in US said...

I have never tried it, so I'll be no help. My mum used to make absolutely lovely bread. I don't think I've ever had homemade bread that wasn't of the crusty variety, though. We used to have it for weekend teatime: great big door stop bread slices with hunks of cheese, followed by tea cakes... mmm.

3 o'clock walk said...

mmm that does sound yummy!

Angel said...

Yeay, for Artisan Bread! I'm glad to see Carmie is getting a lot of use out of that little apron I got her for Christmas. I think Mom has an extra breadmaker. I think I had it at one point but I THINK I gave it back to her. Don't quote me on that.

marissa | Rae Gun Ramblings said...

So I'm thinking your dough was more watery because different flours measure out and absorb liquid differently. Don't give up on it. You'll learn to read the dough by how it looks. Most no knead recipes are way more wet than other bread dough (like won't hold shape but shouldn't be like cake batter if that makes sense). A great book is Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day (if you search for bread on my blog you can see my different trials) It's totally worth the effort of figuring it out.

Recipes that have milk or a good amount of fat (like oil or butter) would probably be more like a sandwich bread. Good luck!

3 o'clock walk said...

thnx for all the great tips Marissa!

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