The Great Bread Experiment

Bread.  I could never ever live without it.  I love bread.  But more specifically, I love healthy whole grain breads, which is lucky for my waistline.  I have been reading a lot of labels lately and this has forced me into the kitchen to make most of our meals completely from scratch.  That means I have taken up the art of baking bread.

For some reason I always thought that baking a wonderful loaf of bread was a hard task, one that only the elite chefs could pull off.  My Gran used to bake bread for us when I was little.  I wasn't allowed in the kitchen when she was cooking (now, as a mom of young children I know why), so I always thought her finished products to be magical in some way.  It is like they appeared, carried on the wings of fairies into our kitchen.  Cupcakes and breads and pancakes, oh my!  I had a great imagination.

Baking bread could NOT BE EASIER. It is so rewarding and so easy that I baked three different types of bread last week alone.  And that is with taking care of an infant and toddler.  It isn't hard, folks, or else I wouldn't do it.  My breads have five ingredients...flour, yeast, salt, sugar/honey, and water.  Seriously, that is all it takes to bake bread.  Now look at the label of the bread in your house.  If there are more ingredients than this, it isn't bread.  It is a bread-like product.

I have decided that I am going to start a bread baking experiment.  I am going to bake different types of breads using different flours and sweeteners to see which one is best.  And I am going to do all of the taste testing myself (maybe a little help from Vance and JW).  For my first loaf, I used just white bread flour, sugar, salt, and Red Star active dry yeast.  I got the recipe for French bread from the Red Star Yeast Web site.  My Gran taught me that the best place to look for basic recipes was on the backs of the boxes of ingredients (flour bags, etc), which translates into the company Web sites in our generation.  she told me that these recipes were always well tested, so a good place for beginners to start.  I combined the ingredients and let it rise for an hour.  Then I punched it down, shaped it into a French bread loaf and let it rise again for another hour or two.  Then I baked it for 30 minutes.  Voila!  The bread I remember from childhood!  Warm, crusty bread right from our own oven and smeared with a generous helping of yummy, organic butter!

For the next loaf, I used whole wheat pastry flour combined with bread flour and honey as the sweetener.  Same procedure.  Great product!  Last weekend I made half whole wheat half white pizza dough which turned out incredibly like the real thing my husband just ate in Italy!  And I topped mine with butternut squash, kale, shallots, and goat cheese.  Mmmmmm.  More breads to come!  Maybe some rye for St Patricks Day?  Check back soon, but until then go bake a loaf, it is too easy and too good!