Baking and Breaking

I have been working on learning to bake bread the old fashioned way as we crave fresh bread but have neither a bread maker nor a bakery around the corner (or 50 corners for that matter).  I have the assistance of my lovely stand mixer, which has become my assistant in much of my baking in the past year.  For the rest of it I have to use patience and scour our recipe books for just the right recipe. Patience not being my strongest suit.  And careful attention to detail hard for me to have during summer holidays.

I should have known there would be a few bumps in the road.

My first attempt was taken from Michael Smith's Best of Chef at Home cookbook.  This book has the world's best brownie recipe.  So it should also have some other solid stuff (my logic).  However, the recipe for City Bread was far too moist (yes, I checked the measurements twice) and our bread had a lovely crust, but a damp inside.  5 cups of flour and 2 cups of liquid are not quite the right proportions.  In fact, now that I think about it, I seem to have had the same problem with this exact recipe before.  Better write a note in the book.  Despite the dampness we ate it anyway.  It tasted okay, and "waste not, want not".

My second attempt was started yesterday.  Traditional bread baking has a long rising for the first rising (8-12 hours) and so there is some forethought required in planning.  I was all into getting pizza dough mixed for dinner and had the mixer out anyway so I started a few hours earlier than was perhaps wise.

Here is my thought process that I worked through after starting the dough. 

"4:30 PM plus eight hours is about midnight.  Hmmm, not the ideal time to knead bread dough and set it for the second rising.  That would mean the third is a 3:00 AM.  Not quite perfect.  But wait, 4:30 PM plus twelve hours is 4:30 AM.  That is just a few hours before 7.  Surely I can get up at 7."  (During the summer holidays?  Dreaming, girl!)

As it turns out a few extra hours (it was 9:30 before I got to the dough this morning) doesn't do the dough any harm at that stage.  Good to know.

However, it is really important not to leave a glass baking dish in the oven while preheating and then putting hot water into said dish to provide steam during baking.  Just in case you didn't know, that makes glass baking dishes shatter all over the inside of a very hot oven.  I'm just letting you know because I didn't even think about it until there was already glass everywhere.

After cleaning up the glass shards and preheating the oven again it all went quite smoothly.  We enjoyed lovely fresh bread for lunch and had a half a loaf left for lightly toasting for breakfast tomorrow.