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A housemate who was once a bread baker for a living told me that there was pretty much nothing I did right about baking bread and that he had no idea why my bread turned out at all. Despite the occasional screw up due to either distraction or a penchant for too much innovation, my bread usually turns out and most people who have had it, like it - or so they say.
I buy bread on rare occasions when my schedule gets packed up and there is no alternative. No fresh bread of mine. No bread I've frozen. No bread we've traded with Breadhead Brian for firewood. I bake four loaves once or twice a week, but that's because this three-person family can go through at least a loaf a day on most days.
What I like about my bread is that I've developed a way of doing it that takes very little kneading. This was not my innovation but advice from a friend of ours. Or maybe it was just what I wanted to hear.
For anyone tired of eating bread not made just the way YOU like it or tired of paying $2.00 a loaf for crap or $5.00 a loaf for the good stuff, here's my four-loaf recipe for you to improvise from. With improvisation as one of the goals here, not all measurements are exact.
In a big bowl ...
pour 1 pint warm water,
sprinkle in enough yeast to cover the surface (2 tsp, maybe),
then add whole wheat flour (three cups or so),
and mix with wooden spoon until it's a batter,
cover with a tea towel and
go do something else for an hour.
Next: add two quarts warm water (or water and milk if you have a milk surplus and want to add more calcium to the bread),
toss in your optional stuff now: toasted seeds, dried sifted nettles, kelp powder, oats, teff, semolina flour, olives .... When adding grains, other flours, etc., with no gluten, don't get too carried away. Anything more than two cups total will undermine the integrity of the bread and the loaves will want to fall apart. Maybe not the first day, but they will before you can finish them all.
Pour a generous handful of salt on top of this.
Then mix in whatever combinati0n of wheat and white flour you desire until you can't use the spoon anymore. Clean the spoon off with more flour. Thickly flour your countertop and plop the glop from the bowl onto the countertop. Keep adding enough flour fast enough so that the dough doesn't stick to anything - much. When you've added flour to the point where the dough is still elastic and just a bit tacky, scoop it up and plomp it back in the bowl. Cover again with a towel.
Go do something else for more than an hour or until the dough has doubled in size.
Now grease four breadpans with olive oil or the next best thing.
Scrape up any dough on the counter from before and lightly flour your surface again. Punch down the dough and then gently turn it out onto the counter. Slide your hand around in the bowl to scrape down the dough clinging to the bottom. Try not to the tear the gluey strands of gluten while doing this. Sprinkle enough flour over the dough and the counter and your hands to allow you reshape the dough into a big smooth pile without it sticking to anything. Get a big knife and divide the dough into four. Do a quick Play-Doh roll on each quarter to get it loaf shaped and to make sure you don't have any folds or giant bubbles in the loaf. Then place each quarter in its tin. Cover all the tins with a towel.
Go do something else for an hour ... or more, depending on how warm your house it.
When the dough is double in size, preheat the over to 350 degrees F.
When the oven is ready, bake for forty minutes or until the bread is golden-brown on all sides and sounds like a hollow-core door when you knock on the bottom and sides of it.
Place on rack to cool with the tea towel back on it. Freeze or refigerate some if you don't go through bread very fast.
More pictures of the process could be provided.
Oh good, that blasted underline is gone. I couldn't find any way to get rid of it when I started this blog yesterday - since underlining isn't even an option listed in the toolbar.
Today when I went out to milk it was windy. Probably 30+mp.h. from the way the trees were moving. Down on the ground, sheltered as we are, the wind wasn't much, but the tops of the big firs were swaying and they were making that ocean surf sound I love.
It's a breadbaking day. I'm going for my usual mix of two-thirds whole wheat flour, one-third white and adding teff grain. Teff really darkens up the loaf and adds a unique nut-like flavor, but only when added whole. Teff flour doesn't taste the same at all. The other great thing about teff is that it is one of the world's smallest cereal grains; they are about the size of bug eggs. This gives me the joy of telling curious visitors and children that I am putting bug eggs in the bread when they ask what the brown stuff is. Nettles always go in the bread, too. And kelp. For iron and iodine, respectively. When my daughter was younger and sometimes lived on bread, I started trying to make our bread as "enriched" as possible without getting flours that have isolated vitamins added to them. I have attention/boredom problems, so I'm often changing things around, like the bread recipe. Especially since I make bread twice a week. Pretty much every week. And have done for years. And years. And years. Okay, not that many years. Only seven years or so. Before that I used to live on a farm with five other adults and the bread duty rotated, so no one did it more than once a month.
The billy goat went away today. The nannies all cried and walked him to the gate. It's been years since we've used a full-sized billy goat for breeding. Usually we have some adolescent kid, and we are never really
sure if he is tall enough to get the job done. (But he always was.) This time the available billy (which primarily means free for the cost of transport and boarding him while he was with us) was this strapping fellow. The nannies were used to rushing out to pounds heads with and beat up the new boy. They stopped their grazing and ran up and ... whoa! Who is THIS! The girls all turned and ran away, then stood in little groups twining their necks together, oggling him and whispering to each other. Whenever we had friends over we had to drag them up to the goat paddock to look at Rothomund (I think that was his name), secretly hoping he would do something dramatic and romantic like pis
s on his long flowing gray beard. He was also something to smell. We could smell him all the way down the hill to the house. Ronan - age 10 - said she often gotten a big powerful whiff of him while she was swinging on the swing under the Bear Tree. (More on the Bear Tree in a later post.) Rothomund was also quite a gentleman - for a goat. He always took "no" to mean no. And even "no no, well, maybe ... no, not yet" as not yet. We humans had to watch for those horns in confined spaces in the stalls, but he was never the least bit aggressive, even when O'un, Venus, and Joy went in heat and he was very much preoccupied with snorting, stamping, lip-curling, charging about suddenly, sniffing privates ...etc.. It almost made us want to keep a billy someday. Almost. But he ate a lot. And like a lot of male farm anima
ls he is only of periodic use, before and after which he would be a fencing and management headache. So back home he went. We weren't the only people who thought he was something, apparently. When Matthew picked him up at a friend's farm in Oakland, Oregon, people were pointing and gesturing to each other in passing cars. When he took him back, some car pulled over to the side of the road and then later passed him, snapping pictures of billy in the truck as they went. I suppose those pictures will appear on someone else's blog somewhere.
In a big bowl ...
