Thursday Thirteen -- Breads

I’ve had a fairly long love affair with bread. It started in college, where the dining hall always had a variety of freshly-baked breads available. I fell in love—so much so that I can still remember the sight, smell, feel, and flavor of my favorite, some sort of light whole wheat bread. The summer after my freshman year of college, returning home to the land of Wonder Bread, I became determined to have access to excellent breads even when the dining hall wasn’t providing them. 

1-3. Breads from the Betty Crocker cookbook. When I first expressed an interest in learning to cook (it wasn’t, in fact, just breads that led me there, though they were a big factor) after my freshman year of college, Mom found an old Betty Crocker cookbook at a yard sale. From there, I learned the basics of kneading and baking bread, and there were basically three breads I made with any regularity: a basic white bread, a light wheat bread, and dinner rolls. The last of these could easily be converted into dinner rolls or the Sticky Buns my grandmother traditionally made for Christmas.

4. At some point in college, mostly lacking the time and patience needed for kneading, I flirted with quick breads. Two that I remember are Milk and Honey Bread, and some kind of oatmeal bread, which I modified to make up some sort of coconut bread one winter break. The danger with the milk and honey bread was that the milk needed to be heated to boiling without scalding it. Sometimes I did better than others. 

5. During college, from a cookbook put out by a friend’s mother and her catering partner, I found what became the staple of my bread-baking for years: Honey Oatmeal Bread. It was a rich bread with its honey and eggs, and relatively easy to make since it could be mixed up in my Kitchen Aid mixer with the paddle attachment. For some reason, I never embraced the dough hook—more on that later.

6. Spinach and Feta bread from Ari. I’ve mentioned before this relatively recent discovery from the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day (which I covet but have not yet purchased). Delicious. 

The following breads all come from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, an excellent book that I picked up a couple months ago. Not only does it give great recipes, but it also gives a great general education in bread baking.

7. Pizza Dough – before I bought the book, I’d experience the book’s pizza dough recipe at my best friend’s place in New York. I’m sure that a conventional oven doesn’t cook this nearly as well as the wood-fired cob oven that he built there; even so, the quality of a pizza has a lot to do with the dough, and this is a good one. 

8. Corn bread using bacon! Need I say more?

9. French Bread – tasty. It’s been fun playing with loaf shapes, too. 

10. Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire – Wow, wow, wow. It’s a great bread that makes me feel good about eating it, it’s so delightfully flavorful and fibrous.

11. Whole Wheat Bread – Most whole wheat bread uses a mixture of whole wheat and white flour to avoid being too heavy. This recipe has other tricks to get around that problem. 

12. Light Wheat Bread – The first time I made this bread, it was awful. I think I didn’t use enough water and I certainly didn’t knead it long enough. This time around, I used so much water that I had to add more flour to fix it, and I let my Kitchen Aid mixer with its dough hook do the hard work. The book indicates that little or nothing is lost (except the exercise!) by letting a mixer knead the bread, so I let it. It very much has a light wheat sandwich bread thing going on.

Here's the bread with its best friend (and one of mine too!).  

13. Sourdough – I’m still experimenting with sourdough breads. I haven’t had a truly successful sourdough bread that didn’t “cheat” and use commercial yeast rather than relying on the wild yeasts. Part of my problem is that with work I don’t have the time to let my bread rise as much as it needs to (sourdough seems much slower). I took a few weeks off from sourdough breads, and only just refreshed my barm and got back to the drawing board—the first new loaves should come out tomorrow—we’ll see how they go. I just love the idea of sourdough: theoretically, I could grow and grind my own wheat, but yeast would still need to be purchased to make bread… unless I can master sourdough! It’s not just a tasty bread to me, it’s a whiff of self-sufficiency. In the background of the picture above, you can see my sourdough starter bubbling away.

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