Bread Recipe

This is the dollar-a-loaf staple that will grace our table for the foreseeable future as our basic, quick(ish), no-nonsense bread, thanks to a handy-dandy bread machine, and a vita-mix to grind the flour.



If I told you it takes 16 hours from start to finish, you'd say. "what's quick about that?". If I then told you that my actual time doing anything is 20 minutes, you might be more impressed.

3 cups hard red wheat berries (or flour if you can't grind your own wheat, its about a pound (450g) either way)
1 1/4 cups water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon oil

1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar

Grind the wheat into flour.

Mix the water and lemon juice, and add this to the flour.
Mix the dough so that it is of even consistency, and you have picked up all of the dry flour.
Mould dough into a rounded shape.
Drizzle the oil over the dough to prevent dehydration. Roll the dough around so that your rounded ball is covered with oil.

Leave to stand in a covered bowl, or drop it straight into the bread machine as listed below.

Make a note of the time of day. Add 16 hours to the current time. This will be the time you want to set for your bread machine to finish its baking. (Note, many bread machines don't let you set a time longer than 12 hours, so you may have to set the time a bit later in the day).

Place the ingredients in your machine according to the manufacturer's recommendation. For my Kenmore machine, I do the following. Set the machine for "yeast bread". Add the ingredients in the order shown

Yeast
Sugar
Oily Dough (put a dent in the dough with your finger to house the salt)
Salt.

The dough can happily sit in the bread machine for the full 12 hours before it starts mixing.

Pull out a beautiful loaf of perfectly risen bread 16 hours after you started.

If you have problems.....

the second rise is where the most significant problems are going to arise. Watch what is happening as the loaf bakes. If it begins to deflate before it bakes, reduce the pre-soaking time in 2 hour increments until it rises to perfection in the first 5 minutes of baking.

If it never quite rises high enough, increase the pre-soaking time in 2 hour increments.

Fiddle until you get the soaking time tight.

Of course, the machine can be programmed to optimal kneading and rising times, but the purpose of this exercise was always to get a perfect loaf of bread from the machine presets with no fuss at all.

I will eventually mess with the rising time to see if I can get a 24 hour soak to come out well. In the meantime, this is a simple, great, healthy, inexpensive loaf of bread.

Take Care

Rod