Bread

I started making my own bread because I am a cheapskate, and I picked up a really fancy bread machine at Goodwill for 40 bucks. I thought well, hell, I eat about a loaf of bread a week, sometimes more than that. At $3.oo a loaf or so, x 52 weeks a year on average, shit that's a ton of money! I had some pretty sorry results to begin with.  Gummy, crumbly wheat bread, sodden heavy white bread. The dough that over expanded and mushroomed out over the top of the pan. The dough I forgot to put yeast in.

But I got past that and now I have 2 recipes that I like an awful lot. This one is the simple one.

250 g. H2O
28 g butter or margarine
22 g dry milk
7 g salt
50 g honey
300 g white bread flour
90 g whole wheat flour
90 g old fashioned oatmeal
7 g instant yeast

The thing is, I don't feel like I really know how to make bread. I put the stuff in the machine, it makes the dough. That's the hard part, usually. I don't like to knead dough because my wrist hurts, and it makes a big mess. Mostly I don't like the mess; my apartment is small, and has carpet. So, the machine does the real work, then it beeps at me when it's time to put the dough in a bread pan. Yes, I know, I could leave the stuff in there and the machine would bake it for me too, but I like the regular loaf pan shape better, and besides, the dough beaters leave these annoying craters in the bottom of the loaf if you do that. Makes it hard to get a neat sandwich out of the middle of the loaf. So I put it in a regular pan, I let it poof up until it's about 1 inch higher than my pan, then I put it in the oven at 350 for 45 minutes. Then I turn the oven off and leave it in there without opening the oven for about 10 more minutes. I take it out, whack the pan (lightly) on my bread board to pop the loaf out and that's it. Let it cool on a rack to keep the outside crispy.

Now I'm a bread snob. The last time I bought a loaf of bread was during the heat wave in august or whenever, and I thought wow, I should have just got bagels or english muffins or something, cuz this stuff sucks!

Here's my complicated recipe, it's the loaf in the picture.

350 g H2O
7 g salt
30 g brown sugar
30 g molasses-don't use the extra dark kind! it's gross.
15 g dry milk optional
30 g butter

Put the above ingredients into the bowl of your bread machine. Layer on the following, in this order:

240 g white bread flour
220 g whole wheat flour
10 g wheat guten
15 g sesame seeds-I use a mix of toasted black & white
12 g poppy seed
40 g cracked wheat
40 g steel cut oats
15 g ground toasted flax seeds
7 g instant yeast


Make the bread the same as above, but add 10 minutes to the baking time, it's a much larger loaf. If you want to make it prettier, take a sharp knife and gently slash the top of the loaf before baking.