More bread

Bread Part 2

As is quite predictable if you know me at all, I messed about with the bread machine and the recipe until I got the bread to where I wanted it.

Another friend of mine (G’day Helen) then handed me a second bread machine… this time a “Breadman” which produces a rectangular loaf, much like a regular bread loaf.

Of course, I set about using the same combination of ingredients as I had used in the other machine… then I read the manual as the first loaf was baking.

The Breadman is a more recent make of machine and is set up to produce bread with little or no sugar. It has a much longer final rise, which means that the recipe I used for the Kenmore was not going to work as well without some significant modification.

So, the first loaf I produced was, expectedly, concave, looking much like a house-brick complete with a “frog” for the mortar. It had, predictably, risen to great heights and then deflated to leave a crater that could easily hold a pint of soup. The flavour is good, but it looks pretty pathetic.

Having read the manual before this loaf had finished baking, I set up my second loaf the same basic recipe but leaving the sugar out completely. This produced another house-brick of the dense and yeasty variety. ☹

I gave it a rest for a day or so, producing a “miracle loaf” (the “oh hell, we have company and I have no flour soaking” loaf) in the Kenmore for Nerida. I’ve gotten good enough with the Kenmore to be able to produce a good loaf on cue by fudging the soaking/moisture/yeast ratios depending on the flour I am using on the day.

So, yesterday, I ground 4 pounds of flour, two from white and two from red wheat. The white ones went into the machines at the same time on an 8 hour soak. The Breadman this time had half the regular sugar. The Kenmore had a standard recipe, and I threw a cup of grated cheese over the top of the loaf as it was rising for the last time.

The Breadman produced a near-perfect loaf of bread, and the Kenmore produced a near-perfect loaf of cheesy bread.

I reloaded the Breadman with the first of the red-wheat loves, this time on a 12 hour soak. I kept the sugar at half-normal and produced a perfect loaf of red-wheat bread.

The last of the red-wheat loaves is in the Breadman now, this one time is timed to start for a 24 hour soak with absolutely no sugar.

It looks like I’ll get the hang of both of these machines.



There are four factors which affect the final rise when working with acid-soaked whole grain breads. These are

• Soak Time – the longer the loaf is soaked, the quicker it will rise (and crater if it rises too soon)
• Moisture - in the loaf and in the air… on a humid day, reduce the moisture by a tablespoon; for a quicker rise, increase the moisture a little.
• Yeast - the more yeast you use the quicker it will rise. Works well with white wheat on a short soak.. you can soak for as little as 4 hours by adding a little moisture and an extra teaspoon of yeast.
• Sugar – the more sugar you use, the faster the yeast goes to work, the quicker it will rise.

I am in the process of extending the soaking times to maximize the benefits of the acid soak.

Oh, and olive oil is the BEST dough conditioner I have found so far. Coconut oil is both more expensive and less effective.

UPDATE:
The last red wheat loaf failed to rise properly.

Something I have come to notice is that the Breadman does not handle dryish dough easily. (the problem occurs because I put moist dough, not base ingredients, into the machine (the Kenmore makes dough out of nearly anything).

I'll have to keep the Breadman recipes a little damp to make sure they knead properly

Take Care

Rod

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

Bread winner of a different kind…

Some of you may be aware that I did a lot of baking while Misti was pregnant with Jack. I learned a lot about bread, and I got to be a reasonable baker thanks to “The Bread Book” from Laurel’s Kitchen. It is a great resource.

Once Jack was born and mobile, it became pretty difficult to commit the time and effort into making bread that I had once enjoyed.

Misti’s recent foray into more traditional foods and “high brix” gardening has also meant that we have been reading some interesting material on traditional methods for treating grains.

Amongst the many options out there is Sue Gregg’s two stage process for baking grains. Now, I’ve got to say that Sue is onto something here. Soaking the flour in an acid mix makes a huge difference to the texture of the finished product, and according to the experts on traditional methods, all ancient cultures treated whole wheat with acid or some other fermentation method before trying to bake with it.

Having said that, I find Sue’s approach to the art of baking to be extremely fussy and unnecessarily complex. Its probably just a cultural difference, so I decided to use her methods for treating grains and return to something more familiar as far as actually doing anything with them is concerned.

A friend of ours gave us a bread machine the other week (G’day Ned) and I finally got around to pressing it into service.

By sheer fluke the very first loaf I produced was perfect. I had adapted a Laurel’s Kitchen recipe to Gregg’s method, shoved it in the machine, and there it was, a perfectly risen loaf of tasty fresh bread.


It was so good, that I proceeded to produce another for our dinner guests the next day. To make in time for dinner, I had to cut the pre-soaking time in half. The result was a less than stellar loaf of yeasty, firm bread. This is the all-too-familiar house-brick, which results when your loaf hasn’t risen properly before baking. Thankfully, it had risen some, so it wasn’t objectionable, but I know I can do better than that. Our gracious guests decided to try some, in spite of my protest. It turns out that one of our guests had grown up in a Steiner school and had baked bread in the third grade on Tuesdays. This none-too-stellar loaf held the wonderful taste of childhood for her. Needless to say, she went home with it, and I went back to the drawing board.

Gregg’s method recommends 24 hours soaking for whole wheat. The first loaf I produced was soaked for 12, and worked perfectly. The second was soaked for 6, and didn’t rise properly. I decided to do the full 24 hour soak on loaf number 3, to see what happens.

Well, it flopped folks!! I had never had a loaf do this before, but it rose too quickly, deflated to flat before it started baking, and came out concave, so that you could safely pour a pint of beer in the crater and you wouldn’t spill any. I had mistakenly doubled the acid in that loaf, so I tried a second, with the same result. The third loaf on a 24 hour soak ended up with an extra half-cup of flour kneaded into it just before the bake, and still came out flat and hard, though this time it was perfectly cylindrical.

So I went back to what had worked so well the first time. 12 hour soak, Laurel’s Kitchen recipe, perfect loaf!!

I extended the next loaf to 16 hours soaking, and the result was a loaf which began to deflate just after baking had started, which means its still high and round on the top, but nowhere near as high as a properly risen loaf.

So, I have decided to settle for the one that works best,

I’ll do a full recipe in another post, so that, if you want to send it on to others, they don’t have to read all this twaddle to get to the good bit!!

Oh, for the record, this comes out at about $1.00 per loaf. It is not only the best tasting whole grain bread you can get without paying big bucks at a boutique bread-shop, its also a lot cheaper, and possibly more nutritious (if what they say about the soaking is correct) than anything you can buy anywhere.