Bread recipes

[Talbot]

Gord,
I introduced the idea of pressure cooked steamed bread, having come across it at http://www.ellenskitchen.com/recipeb.../steambrd.html

[hellosailor]

talbot, if you have yeast problems, you stick to making soda bread then? The GF cake recipes I've used are soda-based instead of yeast, so I'd expect that can be made to work. Rash guess that you could use citric acid (aka vitamin C or "sour salts" or lemon juice) instead, the extra acidity should also help as a natural "fungicide".

Gord-
Dunno, "steamed" bread sounds a lot like dumplings to me.<G> When you are not baking with Draino, ergh, Wheat flour, one loaf of bread can cost about $6-7US and about five of that can be the other flours. So radical experiments can be an expensive hobby. The pressure cooker routine really sounds like just a modern version of baking in a dutch oven, which is covered (or WAS covered<G>) in a lot of old cook books and camping cook books. Usually something like "prepare a bed of coals...place the dutch oven...cover with coals...remove after ## hours." And the only temperature control was the natural temperature of charcoal or wood coals after the fire was out. Maybe with a pressure cooker, if you removed the vent plug and inserted a meat thermometer through that hole, and then carefully marked the position of the burner knob that gave you 350F ?

[Talbot]

My GFbread comes with a yeast free raising agent already added, all you do is plop it into the breadmaker , add liquid and an egg (+ any other inredients you feel like such as seeds) and switch on the machine - cost (with import tax and fluctuations in exchange rate + international sea mail) is abt £4.50

[hellosailor]

Talbot-
That's about $8.66US today. Depending on the shipping that might be reasonable. It may or may not be worth your while to look at buying the flours locally, i.e. tapioca, potato, rice, and bean (two kinds) are what almost all the mixes use, and at least in the US they've become common in the "ethnic foods" section of most supermarts. You can have quite a variety in the combination and still get good (relatively<G>) breads from them. AFAIK the yeast-free rising agent can only be baking soda or baking powder, might be listed as something like "sodium bicarbonate" on the ingredients.
I figure using the flours instead of the "special" GF mix saves about half on it. On the one hand, the plethora of GF supplies at "health food" stores recently is great. On the other hand, at least in the US, health food stores are no longer what they used to be in the 60's. They've become places catering to neurotics with money, selling some things for 2x-4x the price of the supermart and having a great time with vitamins no lab every heard of, preferably packaged with a high colonic and "cleansing" tea that also "doubles your manhood satisfaction".<G>

All I want is food without Draino it in, they can keep the holy mysteries.

[KaptainKen]

Quote: "All I want is food without Draino it in."

Sounds dangerous. I'd like to avoid food containing Draino too. Do you have a list of foods containing Draino?

[hellosailor]

Ken, per msg.17, I called gluten "Draino" because for me, the Draino is a safer ingredient.

The *real* Draino, that is to say, lye, is actually a key ingredient of corn tortillas and some other corn products where is it used to break down the shell of the corn kernel.

Tthey don't make it easy to read the labels. You'd never figure that gluten is present in most commercial chicken soups, flavored potato chops, sugared almonds (aka "Jordan" almonds), or US-market tamari (a soy sauce made without wheat in the genuine form) but, there it is. And it is present in most commercially assembled poultry products and even the "char" marks on bogus grilled foods, which are produced with caramel coloring, made from malt. The stuff is insidious.

[KaptainKen]

Sorry to hear that you have to avoid gluten. And that must include most conventional breads. Gluten is the elastic component that makes the little bubbles in bread dough that prevents carbon dioxide created by yeast fermentation from being driven off during baking. Wheat flour with a high gluten content is called "strong" or "hard" flour, and is used for breads, whereas flour with a lower gluten content is called "soft" flour, and is used for cakes. No gluten is contained in rice, corn, millets, buckwheat, quinoa, sorghum, or amaranth. Cornbread, for example, has the consistency of cake ... hard to make a sandwich with it.

None-the-less those of us without a problem with gluten would still like to know how to make regular, high gluten, conventional bread using a pressure cooker.

[Talbot]

KaptainKen

try http://www.waypoints.com/PDF/pressur...er%20bread.PDF
or http://www.boatus.com/goodoldboat/pressure.htm
or from ARC2005 Blesma Blog
Method Prove the dough (from bread mix) for half hour. Knock the dough back, place in pressure cooker insert tray. Place Trivet (flat thing with holes in it) into bottom of pressure cooker with 4 tblspns water. Put on low heat until proved (it doubles in size in the moist atmosphere created by the small amount of water). Put lid on and turn up to full for 35 mins; turn off heat and stand for 40 mins. Bread is then ready.

Hellosailer,
The difference with the Aus breadmix is the quantity of Maize flour contained in it

[KaptainKen]

Talbot;

Thanks! I'll give it a try at home and, after practice, try it on the boat.

[hellosailor]

Ken-
"Gluten is the elastic component that makes the little bubbles in bread dough" Not really. CO2 makes the bubbbles, gluten simply gives the dough enough elasticity to trap and hold them. And, is intrinsic to the "punch it down and double rise" business. GF doughs are *not* punched down and will not rise twice, if you punch them down they tend to stay down, whether yeast or chemical (soda) risen, AFAIK.

Talbot-
That makes your cooker recipe suspect, I've never seen a GF dough that would rise properly after being punched down. In the US we call maize "corn", and there are GF recipes that include corn flour to give it a bit of texture. What we call a "rye bread" at the bakeries is in fact also a mix of rye, wheat, and corn flour, more properly called "corn bread" but confusingly nothing like what really is a "corn bread" in the Southern US.<G> That's more like what we use for "corn muffins", which are the common muffins in the north.

4 tablespoons of water in a pressure cooker...Dunno, I've got two and I think they are respectively 5 and 8 quarts, so "4 tablespoons" without knowing what size cooker they put it into, doesn't mean much. Between that and the shift to GF...

I'll wait for you guys to tell me what comes out.<G>

[Talbot]

hellosailor

That makes your cooker recipe suspect, I've never seen a GF dough that would rise properly after being punched down.

The recipes above for KaptainKen are not GF

[GordMay]

10 Types of European Breads With Fascinating Stories
Good bread is pretty much a given around Europe. In small villages and large metropolises alike, bakeries continue to be fairly commonplace and lots of folks still eat bread on a daily basis. From France’s long, crusty loaves to Northern Europe’s dense, dark rye, local, high-quality breads are on offer everywhere on the continent. But what should you sample where and why? Here are 10 typical European breads to try and the local legends that explain their origins.
➥ https://www.afar.com/magazine/10-eur...nating-stories

Explore the world through 9 different breads
French baguettes, South Asian chapati, German pumpernickel, and six other loaves tell tales of culture, cuisine, and history.
➥ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/t...ound-the-world

100 Most Popular European Breads
➥ https://www.tasteatlas.com/100-most-...eads-in-europe

[goboatingnow]

Can’t beat a slice of pumpernickel

[goboatingnow]

Very difficult to justify home baking yeast bread in Europe and impossible in Greece.

[JanetGroene]

IMHO this is the best advice yet about bread baking.

Originally Posted by hellosailor

RL, the recipe is actually not very important. There are zillions of them.

More important is just getting your kitchen and your hands dirty.<G> You'll find slight differences in the amount of moisture in the flour, the amount of liquid in the mix, the heat of the oven, all ensure you'll need lots of practice to get a consistantly good loaf just the way you like it. To bake well and bake consistantly well? You need to be a real lab chemist, doing things very precisely and repeatably.