Greeting Card Campaign: 11-17 Homemade Bread Day

Click here to download the free card.

November 17 is Homemade Bread day, celebrating the delicious goodness of bread made, not by machine, but by your own hands (or in my case, my own hands and a $250 Kitchen-aid mixer with a dough hook!  Make your sweetie some homemade bread toast for breakfast this morning and impress her with your mad baking skills.  Get the recipe and secret hints right here.  Also make her a much easier gift - this downloadable, printable Homemade Bread Day Card.

Just click on the caption below the picture of the homemade bread.  The link will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs.  Download the file. Don't try to print the file from within Google Docs. I use a lot of fonts and Google Docs doesn't seem to like them very much.  Instead, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "download" and copy the file to your own computer. Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you prefer.  Print the card from there and it should be fine.

This is a side fold card, so when you print it, be sure to select "landscape" and if you have two-sided printing, choose "flip on the short side" so that the inside of the card is the same way up as the outside.

© by Tom King

Daily Bread for the Home Office

I love the smell of homemade bread, especially when I'm working at my desk in my home office. Unfortunately, I'm flying solo right now because my wife is in Seattle taking care of her sister. I've gotten used to having homemade bread on a regular basis over the past couple of years. It was one of those things, no one particularly wanted to do and I discovered early on that if I wanted homemade bread I'd better figure out how to make it. I did and even wrote a blog about making homemade bread with a bread machine.  Check out the link. There's everything an amateur bread-maker needs to know in that post.  I'm not here to talk about bread-making itself, but about the "sequence" needed to do it and work at the same time.

One thing I discovered about using a bread machine was that I got a lot of waste bread if I leave the baking part to the machine.  The bread machine bakes the loaf in the hopper with the stirring paddle in the middle of the dough.  It leaves a messy hole in the middle of the loaf when you lift it out. 

Then I discovered the "dough" cycle.  I found I could make better homemade bread by letting the bread machine make the dough and then reshaping it and dumping it into a bread loaf pan.  Baked in the oven, the loaf was pristine and solid through and through.

Now my only remaining problem was working breadmaking into my busy day. Every do-it-yourselfer is (or should be) familiar with the law of sequences.  For any DIY project, you have to respect the sequence or it all gets messed up. So here's the sequence:

1. Take a break from the desk for 15 minutes.  Set the recipe before you on the counter so you don't leave anything like yeast or salt out.  Take out the bread pan and spray the inside with Pam cooking spray.

2.  Set all the ingredients on the counter.  Put them away after you add them to the mix. That way you don't forget anything. If you did forget anything, it will be whatever is still sitting on the counter. It took me several disasters before I quit trusting my memory in the middle of a writing project. 

3.  Put all the ingredients into the bread machine.  Pile all the dry ingredients into the machine hopper first, then the butter or oil and finally the wet ingredients like milk and eggs.

4.  Press the select button and choose the "dough" cycle.  Then press the "start" button.  Follow the instructions for meddling with the dought for the first couple of minutes (see my earlier article for the secret bread-making techniques my grandmother taught me). 

5.  Go away and work some more till the bread-maker beeps at you that the dough is finished.

6.  Lift the dough onto a cutting board and pat it into loaf shape. Make sure you work out the hole in the middle from the mixer paddle. 

7. Gently set the dough into the loaf pan and set pan and dough, covered with a dish towel in a warm place (not the oven). I set my bread on the dryer with a load going inside.  Set the oven to 350 degrees and let it preheat.

8.  Go away and work for a half hour or so, then check the dough. If it's risen, set the pan in the oven. It will rise some more as it cooks.  Set a timer to buzz in 20 minutes.  Check the loaf till the top crust is a nice crusty brown.  It should be done. 

9.  Remove the pan from the oven and turn the loaf out on the cutting board.  It should fall right out if you remember these three rules:  (1) Never wash your bread loaf pan in the dishwasher. (2) Never leave your bread loaf pan to soak - it's better to leave it dry and clean it later if you can't wash it now.  (3) Wash it out with mild warm soapy water and then rub the inside with oil.  Let is sit out on the counter to fully dry before you put it away. See my article on curing a skillet. It's the same principle. If you treat your loaf pan right it will never stick.  The bread will just fall out of the pan after it's baked. 

10. Slice off the end of the loaf and put butter on it.  Eat it and let the loaf cool while you go back to work. You've wasted enough time baking bread!  Clean up later. If you cleaned up as you went along, you don't have any cleanup to do other than cleaning out the bread machine.

Looks like that if you bake it in a loaf pan instead
of the bread machine.

The whole thing takes half a day. You continue working and take several short breaks, the longest, of which, once you get organized is about 15 minutes. Most of the steps can be done in under 3 minutes and it really doesn't interfere with your day.  I'm baking a loaf as I write this.  The picture above is the actual bread dough I made. I'll try to remember to come back and add a picture of the finished product.

Hope your "daily bread" comes out good!

Bon' appetite

Tom

The Bread Machine Secret

You can buy a bread machine, but that doesn't guarantee your bread will be any good.

It promises to be easy to do, but in reality, mmmmmmmmmm not so much!

There is a secret to making bread and I will share it with you. It involves no exotic ingredients, no special kitchen tools or the wearing of special underwear (although you may if you wish. The secret to great bread-making is knowing what a baby's butt feels like when you pat it!

Of course, you actually have to have taken a run at diaper changing at some point in your life. If you have not, then by all means, run straight out, find a baby, remove it's diaper and pat its butt. If you get home without being arrested, then you are ready to make Grandma's bread.

Introduction:


The "Bread Machine Recipes" cookbook says to measure all the ingredients carefully. If you ever watched you grandmother bake bread, you realize at once what balderdash that is. The truth is bread wants to be baked. The flour and yeast and stuff wants to become a beautiful loaf of golden crusted bread. It has no higher ambition. You, as the baker, are merely the facilitator of this exquisite transformation. So remember, the ingredients are merely a suggestion. It is the baby's butt that is the key!

Ingredients:

• Half cup or so of hot tap water (not boiling)

• Teaspoon of salt

• One egg

• 2 tablespoons honey, Karo Syrup or a big handful 

  of brown sugar. (As you gain confidence - and weight 

  - you WILL later add more than this I promise you).

• 2 cups of whole wheat flour

• 3/4 cup or so of white all-purpose flour

• A big glop of butter or margarine, a couple of 

  tablespoons of Olive or vegetable oil or some Crisco, 

  whatever you have.

• 1/4 cup of nonfat dry milk (I've never done it this way 

  - I put this in for historical purposes). I use a quarter 

  can of evaporated milk.

• 1/4 cup or so of wheat germ.  This was another of my 

  grandmother's secrets for making the bread the right 

  texture and adding nutritional value to it.  Wheat germ 

  is the heart of the grain and is very good for you and 

  also slightly crunchy, a quality which I like in my wheat bread.

• 2 packages of rapid rise yeast or regular yeast or a yeast cake 

  - whatever works for you.

Directions:

1. Dump everything into the bread machine in any order you want. They say it matters, but it doesn't. Just don't do the water yet. Make sure you screw in the twirler paddle dealy bob before you pour in the ingredients or it gets real messy trying to get the thing on there and rotating freely - I do that a lot (like tonight).

2. Program the machine for basic bread and a 1.5 pound loaf. If you want to not have the hole in the bottom from the paddle that you get when you bake it in the machine, then set it for dough. You'll have to pull out the loaf, reshape it and put it in a bread pan to bake in your oven, but you're on your own there. I make 3 of these babies or more a week on a good week and I don't want to have to watch the oven - am almost certain recipe for smoked bread if I'm watching it cook. Press Start.

3. Fiddle with the dough as it forms. The bread recipe book stopped at step 2. It is wrong to do so, especially since I haven't told you to put in the water yet. Once you press start, you must tend to the critical initial kneading of the loaf. Open the top of the bread machine. Watch the paddle dealy (no need to learn these technical names - it will be obvious to you what the paddle dealy is). Use a big wooden spoon and poke on the dough ball as it forms so that it picks up all the flour as you slowly add the hot water. Don't use all the hot water before it starts coalescing into dough. You may not need it all.

4. Be patient. At first it won't look like there's enough water, but keep poking the dough ball down to pick up the excess flour. You may need to add some flour if the dough ball is too sticky. Here's where the secret comes in!

5. Feel the dough. If it feels just like a baby's butt when you pat it, you have achieved doughy perfection. Add hot water or flour to achieve the perfect texture. Once you have done that, go away and let the machine do its job. Come back in about 3 and a half hours to witness the completion of the process.

6. Most bread machines use the paddle dealy to push the bread out when it is done. I try to get there before that happens so that the bottom of my bread doesn't get squashed. I take it out before the machine ejects it. It may just be my machine, but that's my recommendation.

7. Enjoy!

Tom King - Baker Extraordinaire
(and God bless whoever invented the bread machine!)