Bread recipes

[rleslie]

I just finished reading the thread on bread makers and it has me craving some home baked bread. How about sharing your bread recipes with everyone!!!!

[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.

[ssullivan]

Hellosailor is right. Here's a copy and paste of a sort of guide to making bread that I sent someone who asked me about it. This PM was sent regarding making whole wheat bread, which is more difficult than white. Same rules apply though. Oh, and the first step to making good bread is to toss that bread machine overboard.

BEGIN COPIED PM WITH BREAD MAKING INFO--


I have a few minutes, so why not... I'll share some of our bread ideas. Here is one way to make a good loaf of whole wheat bread that you can add some flax or something to:

First, most breads that say "whole wheat" in the stores are hardly that. They sprinkle a little whole wheat flour in and use probably 80% white flour. Read the labels to see how much fiber the bread has. The amount of fiber directly reflects the amount of whole wheat flour in it.

With that in mind, you want to find a balance you can live with. You can do 100% whole wheat flour or some other mixture. We find a mixture that is tolerable is maybe 2/3 whole wheat and 1/3 all purpose white flour. Bread flour is very high in the gluten, which is the sugar that white flour has lots of that is known to trigger diabetes. If diabetes is not a concerns, go ahead and use bread flour. For us, it's a concern, so we don't use it. The quality of your flour is important though. We go to Whole Foods and buy their store brand flours. Very good stuff.

Here we go:

First, take 1/2 cup of water and heat it up to the temp of a baby bottle. (98-105 deg - but just splash it on your wrist or stick your finger in to see...) Drop in about a tablespoon of sugar and the suggestes amount of yeast (1 packet or whatever your yeast says).

If all went well, you'll see the yeast sit, then at some point in the next couple minutes, chunks will quickly start rising to the top, forming a foamy island.

Once this bloom is looking strong and complete, you can add the remaining ingredients in. We usually go for about 1 cup of water, 1/4 cup of canola oil (or more depending on taste), a pinch of sea salt, and enough wheat and white flour to make the dough into a consistency that it sticks together instead of to the bowl. Try 1/3 white to 2/3 whole wheat as your first base, then vary it from there. If you want it more like store bread, use more white. if you want it more healthy, use more wheat. Add in any flax or any type of grain, but go sparingly... too much will cause a crumbly loaf.

Now you can kneed the bread - throw away your bread machine. You can use the dough hook, or if you want a little exercise and a loaf made with care, use your hands. Fold the dough and press it out and away from you. Repeat this for 15 mins or so, until the dough has a very elastic quality, like play-do'h, without any dry spots.

Now put the dough in a large bowl and let it rise for an hour or so. (cover with a little saran wrap just to keep dust off of it) Don't completely seal it off - it needs oxygen or it will taste like beer!

Take it from the bowl after an hour (it should be all puffed up now). Re-knead it using some canola oil on your counter to keep it from sticking. Knead it only for maybe 4-5 mins this time. Make sure it has no air bubbles in it, and put it in your bread pan or form a ball and put it on a flat pan - depends on what shape loaf you want.

Make sure to grease the pan well so the loaf comes out easily and doesn't tear.

Cook for 45 mins at 350 (pre-heat the oven too)

Flip the loaf out, and set it on a cooling rack. We can never resist, so we eat it before it's cool ever time!

Best of luck!

[hellosailor]

Sean-
"Oh, and the first step to making good bread is to toss that bread machine overboard. " You KNOW that's a MARPOL violation.<G> And as someone who reluctantly is forced to bake, because wheat products will kill me, I can tell you that a breadmaker works very nicely once you've lifted your leg a few times and explained who the alpha dog in the pack is.<G>

I've still got to learn how to master the pressure cooker and coffeecan school of baking for shipboard, but in a land kitchen at least, throwing everything in the breadmaker beats a lot of cleanup!<G>

Kneading, rekneading, long rise times...that's only for folks using wheat flours. No wheat, no gluten, and then baking gets REAL difficult.<G>

[ssullivan]

Very true, Hellosailor. If you are gluten restricted, then you have no hope of making traditional breads (I think... wouldn't really know). My post above was a PM to another member here who asked me about making bread the traditional way. It was detailed, so I thought I'd share it with the crowd.

[KaptainKen]

I'm with "hellowsailor": I've heard of a bread making technique using a pressure cooker, but I've never seen step-by-step description.

C'mon folks! Share the knowledge. How do you do it? I'd like to try it out.

[hellosailor]

Sean-
Traditional breads are fine for me. Just not the newfangled ones made with Draino, ergh, Wheat. Or Barley. Or a couple of other grains.

Ken-
From what I haven't read, the pressure cooker is acting to retain the moisture from the dough. Moisture control being Real Damned Important in breadmaking, even to the choice of gas/vs/electric stoves because of the way they change moisture levels and results.
But from what I've heard...no one mentions temperature control, so the question is, I guess, how big a kettle and how small a flame?<G>

Corn tortillas go a long way to explaining why Mexico hasn't become a superpower.<G>

[ssullivan]

So what kind of bread do you eat, Hellosailor? Ezekiel? (sp?)

I don't know very many traditional breads that don't use flour (wheat). I'm curious, because I'd like to try and make some by hand.

[Alan Wheeler]

Bread can be made from many other substitutes. I have even heard of bread being made from potatoe. Never tried it though. I have tried pumkin bread, but it is very heavey. I imagine potatoe being similar or even worse. I have tried Corn and that has a very different tast than Wheat flour. Quite nice. But for light floffy breads, I have not seen anything that has been better than wheat. That is I have not seen. Maybe there is something out there.

[hellosailor]

Wheels, in the US traditional hamburger and hot dogs buns (especially hot dog buns) are made with potato flour, aka "potato starch flour" but rarely 100% from it. Every flour, except wheat flour, is problematic because without the magic gluten proteins, it gets dry and crumbles like a three day old corn muffin. Which is also why corn muffins crumble, and why MOST of them actually have wheat flour in them as well. Just about everything does.

Rice, potato, and tapioca flour can combine to impersonate a good white loaf. There's pretty much nothing that can impersonate a good Russian black bread, but that's almost impossible to find anyhow. Must just not be to modern tastes outside of Russia.

Pumpkin bread, at least in the US, is made *with* pumpkin, but not *of* pumpkin flour. Again, there is usually a flour base in it. These days...wheat gluten is found in everything from soy sauce to chicken soup, and for 1-3% of the "Anglo ancestry" populations, it has been a silent killer. The real problem has only been diagnosed and publicized in the past 5 years or so, and in the entire US if you ask a family doctor about it, you'll wind up with about a 50-50 chance of a blank stare. The ones that don't stare, will wind up sending you to the same two or three (literally) experts no matter which part of the country you come from. One of those is a doc from Oz who comes to the US from time to time, at that!
Ten years ago? It was just "you're sick, we don't really know why." And given the way gluten gets around (even in chicken soup and potato chips?!) it is easy to understand why no one could pin it down. Very much an Agatha Christie mystery.

[GordMay]

Gluten is the insoluble component of grains (such as wheat, barley, and rye). It is a mixture of gliadin, glutenin, and other (toxic) proteins.
Gluten causes allergic reactions in certain* people.
*Celiac disease, also known as gluten intolerance, is a (life-long) genetic inflammatory condition of the gastro-intestinal tract that affects the small intestine in genetically susceptible individuals. The disease mostly affects people of European (especially Northern European) descent, but recent studies show that it also affects Hispanic, Black and Asian populations as well (about 1 in 133 Americans are affected).
Symptoms of celiac disease can range from the classic features, such as diarrhea, weight loss, and malnutrition, to latent symptoms such as isolated nutrient deficiencies but no gastrointestinal symptoms. The only treatment for celiac disease is to follow a gluten-free diet.
More: http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddise...liac/index.htm

[Talbot]

interesting the way this thread has gone! I am also a gluten free (and dairy) fanatic cause of what it does to me!

At home we make the bread in a breadmaker. I have tried a lot of different types, but much prefer an Australian one from http://www.bodhi.com.au/ and we import this into UK twice a year. Like most gluten free breads, it is not much good for sandwiches, but makes a good toast. It also keeps well in the fridge - but not out of it due to lack of preservatives

I have been researching breadmaking in the pressure cooker, and there appear to be two seperate ways. one uses the pressurecooker as an oven, and you leave out the seal and the weights, and either plonk the bread into a basket raised off the bottom, or straight down onto a bed of oatflakes, and use a low heat, preferably through a heat diffuser.

The other alternative is to have water in the base of the cooker, and you steam the bread under pressure, using about the same timescale as you would if you were cooking in the oven.

However, I have yet to try either method!

[hellosailor]

Um, steamed bread, ah....I think I'll save that one for another day.<G>

Any real bread with no preservatives will spoil fairly easily but I can get almost a week with no problems *if* I treat the bread with care. That means using a clean paper towel (paper is sterile when produced and stays close to sterile on the roll) to handle the loaf, no finger or hand contact no matter how clean they are. Then I only need to keep it fairly dry (high temps & humidity will mold anything<G>) and loosely covered. An unused microwave makes a good breadbox...one of these days I'll get a real breadbox or gut the microwave.<G>

Obviously the fridge works too, with the usual differences about refrigerated bread.

Talbot, you're right about it making a bad sandwich loaf since it crumbles so quickly. But if you add Xantham Gum, which *is* a natural product, about 1 heaping teaspoon per cup of "flour" regardless of type, the GF bread is fairly useful for 5 days, tops 7. If you use too much Xantham gum, you get "gummy" bread, but one teaspoon per cup of flour seems to work very nicely. I've also used guar gum, which is cheaper but doesn't seem to work anywhere near as well.

On the one hand, I'd really just rather not bake at all. On the other hand...this means that much less preservatives going into my body, and that just HAS TO be a good thing. I suppose I could put them in the GF bread <G> but the only ones I use are salt and vinegar, most of the recipes call for a dash of both. Partly to control the yeast, partly to control the "other yeast", aka the mold and fungus.<G>

[Talbot]

the only ones I use are salt and vinegar, most of the recipes call for a dash of both. Partly to control the yeast, partly to control the "other yeast", aka the mold and fungus.

Only problem with that is I also have problems with candida, so have to avoid yeast. My body also reacts badly to vinegar.

[GordMay]

hellosailor:
I’m looking forward to the “other day”, when you enlighten us about steamed bread.
I’m always interested in oven-less recipes & techniques.