I had a
friend in Newfoundland that use to call bought bread, baker’s fog. His wife made bread the old fashion way
almost every day.
We started
making our own bread about 1986. We were
teaching school in an Athabaskan Indian village about 150 miles north of
Fairbanks. Alaska. My wife and I together
taught grades kindergarten through six.
The planning involved left very little time for bread making, or
anything else, so a bread machine was the answer.
Our first machine was a DAK we bought before returning to the village for the second year.
This was before the internet, so
there was no buying on line. The machine
made passable bread, but the loafs were round.
We have always referred to that first machine as R2-D2.
About eight years later, in the nineties, we bought our second bread machine, a Breadman Ultra, and it made great bread.
We have
gone through two Breadman machines, and last year our last one bit the
dust. We ordered another Breadman, but
it was a piece of garbage and we returned it
Now we have a Cuisinart and it is, in our opinion, the best we have owned.
MAKING BREAD
Today’s
society requires instant gratification.
People buy bread machines, and if the bread doesn’t turn out the first
few times they use it, they declare the breadmaker is at fault.
Making
consistently good bread with a bread machine requires some amount of
practice. When the ingrediency begin to
mix, you need to know what a good dough looks like, and make adjustments. Eventually you will have your recipe down pat
and will make consistently good bread.
We make
one-and-a-half pound loafs, because the two-pound bread slices are too big for
the toaster.
OUR STANDARD
RECIPE.
Exact
measurements are necessary.
1 1/8 cup of water goes into the bread pan
2 ½ tablespoons
of olive oil are added
3 cups of
all-purpose flower added (not bread flour.)
1 tablespoon
of sugar on one side of the pan
1 teaspoon
of salt on the other side of the pan
1 Teaspoon of Fleischmann’s yeast (not bread machine yeast or rapid yeast) in the middle of the pan.
(recipes that came with our bread
machine call for two or more teaspoons of yeast – this is not necessary – one teaspoon
works great.)
We select the White Bread setting, 1 1/2 pound loaf
When the
ingredients start to mix, wait a few minutes then scrape the sides of the bread
pan to remove any sticky dough. Our machine
beeps just before the last kneading and we remove the bread pan, dump the dough
on a flowered sheet and remove the paddle, kneed the dough a few times to shape
a loaf and replace the dough in the bread pan and return it to the
breadmaker.
Cutting the
bread is a skill I never mastered well and often resulted in slices too thick
or too thin. I have now found the
solution
Bambusi
bamboo bread slicer.
I am still
working on perfection, but again anything done well takes practice.
the Ol'Buzzard
