Fun thread

[Daniel]

I'd be willing to put up 1,500 GBP in trade for a metric tonne of gold! I just hope the delivery truck won't have a problem with our dirt roads.


ETA: Oops. Your post didn't push us to the top of a new page, but my response did.

TURD BURGLAR

There. Fixed it.

[scdaffron]

Look at Daniel being a problem-solver

[Miss Terri Novelle]

This one might even be better.



Thanks for keeping the tone of this thread on track, Daniel!

[scdaffron]

OMG, these are fantastic. ("Stop emailing about the toaster!")

TURD BURGLAR

[Daniel]

I can't blame him for his insistence. I've had my eye on the De'Longhi four-slice toaster myself, although I'm not sure about getting it in red. That's one sweet appliance.

[Miss Terri Novelle]

We just bought a new toaster because I got sick of hearing the complaints about the old one burning (okay...to him burnt means that it actually has color on it) his toast even at the lowest setting. After a month, the new one is doing the same...but only to him. My toast comes out perfectly every time. We each prefer different kinds of bread and I believe his choice is what is causing the problem. I think it might have a lower browning point than the toaster can handle.

Probably shoulda got a De'Longhi

Turd Burglar

[Daniel]

I make most of our bread, but when I buy a loaf, I've learned to read the label carefully. Even the organic breads tend to have a lot of sugar in them. Most of them are too sweet for me, and the sugar makes them brown easier.

To give you an idea, a serving size of bread is typically one slice. It's not uncommon for commercial bread to have 4-6 mg of sugar per serving. 4 mg is a teaspoon, so that means a single sandwich can have from two tsp to a full tbsp of sugar in just the bread! That kind of horrified me when I realized it, and I've been much more reliable about making bread at home since then. My dough recipe calls for 1 tsp of sugar and 1 tsp of salt for the whole loaf.

[Miss Terri Novelle]

I would love to make my own bread. And whenever I do, it comes out lousy. I have a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dough hook to make things easier and I have no idea where I'm botching the process. In every other respect, I'm an excellent baker. I make a sky high biscuit that lives up to the name and is a thing of beauty. I've managed to cobble together a respectable pizza dough, but anything more complicated and the yeast starts laughing at me.

[ameliasmith]

I also bake, though my annoying husband prefers the factory-made pre-sliced stuff with all the preservatives in it because it isn't "hard." Maybe it really is the sugar.

FWIW, my bread is not hard as homemade bread goes, and I also don't use lots of sugar, and sometimes none at all. When I do, it's usually a generous pinch of brown sugar which probably comes out to about 1 tsp per loaf, unless it's a sweet bread, like the Stollen I make at Christmas. Then it has more sugar.

[scdaffron]

The book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is a life changer. Here's an article that explains it and has the basic recipes:
www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/five-minutes-a-day-for-fresh-baked-bread-zmaz08djzgoe

The bread is beyond fabulous. Daniel varies it now quite a bit and also incorporates sourdough starter, but if you start with the basic recipe, you'll end up with some seriously yummy stuff.

[djmills]

I have made my own bread since forever (actually since I was 16 years old and mould inhibitor was placed in baker bread).
I now have 2 (or 3) single loaf bread maker electric machines, but I only use them to mix and proof the dough. I hand shape and cook in proper bread tins in the oven.
Thanks for the link. I will check out the five minutes different recipes. :-)

[Miss Terri Novelle]

Jan 25, 2017 14:53:58 GMT -5 scdaffron said:

The book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is a life changer. Here's an article that explains it and has the basic recipes:
www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/five-minutes-a-day-for-fresh-baked-bread-zmaz08djzgoe

The bread is beyond fabulous. Daniel varies it now quite a bit and also incorporates sourdough starter, but if you start with the basic recipe, you'll end up with some seriously yummy stuff.

Okay, I'm going to be grabbing that one


I do have a bread machine and I've tried it for mixing the dough. It did okay. I've even used the timer on it to try and have fresh bread in the morning. It was not good bread....but it was fresh. Mixes worked okay but they quit selling them once the bread machine craze died down.

[Daniel]

Like djmills, I used a bread machine just to make dough for years. Every time I tried to make dough by hand, I ended up with a brick.

When my second machine died, I picked up the artisan bread book that Susan mentioned. Like Laura, I now use a KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook. After successfully making artisan bread for a while, I got brave and tried making regular sandwich loaf. Now, it seems like I can do no wrong. I end up with yummy bread even when I screw something up.

One of the tricks I learned with the KitchenAid was that the dough hook needs help. Once the dough gets past the basic mixing stage, it tends to ride up the hook and just spin in the mixer. To get the machine to do most of the kneading, I use a cheap, long-handled plastic mixing spoon to guide the main mass of dough back down into the bowl so the hook can spin through it. It takes practice to do this. I broke a couple of stiff, brittle spoons and shredded a silicone spatula before I discovered that a plain crappy mixing spoon had the right profile and flexibility to handle the task. I sometimes take the dough out and knead it by hand a bit before letting it rise but most times I don't bother.

[djmills]

Yes, like DRMarvello, my Kenwood dough hook wraps the dough around the hook, and a wooden spoon helps to push the dough back down towards the hook. Easier to mix and kneed in the Breville and Sunbeam bread machines. All fun and games and eating fresh soft bread straight out of the oven with melted butter on top.

[Miss Terri Novelle]

Going to try my first batch tomorrow for Alan's birthday. He's also getting a fancy cake made with fermented fruit. I go the lazy route, you're supposed to start with fresh pineapple to make the starter and ferment it for weeks then start adding more fruit over a period of time (canned peaches, pineapple and maraschino cherrie) along with a lot of sugar. The fruit ferments and the juice turns alcoholic. I cheat the process by just dumping some brandy or rum into a jar along with some sugar and fruit and let it sit out for a week or so. Tastes the same in the end.

[Daniel]

Jan 26, 2017 20:18:15 GMT -5 Miss Terri Novelle said:

Going to try my first batch tomorrow for Alan's birthday. He's also getting a fancy cake made with fermented fruit. I go the lazy route, you're supposed to start with fresh pineapple to make the starter and ferment it for weeks then start adding more fruit over a period of time (canned peaches, pineapple and maraschino cherrie) along with a lot of sugar. The fruit ferments and the juice turns alcoholic. I cheat the process by just dumping some brandy or rum into a jar along with some sugar and fruit and let it sit out for a week or so. Tastes the same in the end.

Your way is probably more reliable. Any fermentation process is a race between bad bacteria and yeast (and/or good bacteria). Fermentations are effectively self-inoculating in that the alcohol they produce helps to protect the brew from bad bacteria. Your approach is "medicated" from the start.

[Miss Terri Novelle]

That's what I figure. It's all baked and smells like heaven. And I did a half batch of the bread recipe. We're having company for dinner tonight, so I decided I'd just go ahead and let the bread rise the once and bake it off. I know what the dough is supposed to look like when it's properly mixed and such, and it did. I let the dough hook do the kneading and we'll see.

The embarrassing thing is that I've worked in a bakery and also in the bakery department of a small grocery store before. The bakery did pastries and not bread. The store used frozen dough which I thawed and then did various things with. We made cheese bread, cinnamon bread, and rolls from the frozen dough. So it's not like I'm completely stumped. It's probably lack of practice and patience with letting the dough hook do it's thing.

One thing I learned quite quickly is that my Kitchen Aid is going to make a mess with the full recipe on that website (the 6-3-3-13 one). The half batch wanted to creep over the side of the bowl and attack.

[Daniel]

Jan 27, 2017 16:24:44 GMT -5 Miss Terri Novelle said:

We're having company for dinner tonight, so I decided I'd just go ahead and let the bread rise the once and bake it off.

That's how I do it, too. One of the things that contributed to getting rid of the brick problem was to ignore the common recommendation that you let the dough rise twice before shaping. I let the dough rise once, shape it, and then let it rise a second time in the pan before baking.

[Miss Terri Novelle]

The bread was pretty good. I didn't even let it rise once before shaping it, but it was still good. Nice texture, not too dense. The crust was a little thick, but all in all, a success. The only complaint was that it was a touch too salty for my taste. Still good, and I assume would only be better with the proper number of risings.

The dough was not as sticky or wet as I thought it would be given the description on the recipe. In fact, I didn't use as much flour as the recipe called for because the dough was getting dry and when I pulled it out of the mixer, it was the opposite of sticky, I could handle it without flouring my hands.

Still, it was slightly better than previous attempts, and I'll keep trying.

[Daniel]

You were smart to go light on the flour. It's much easier to add more flour to a sticky dough than to add water to a dry dough.