I love bread.
Italy was great, because good bread (often accompanied by good cheese) was around every corner. Home, not so much. I mean, we do have good bread here, but very little of it shows up in my kitchen. My mother is diabetic and doesn't eat a lot of carbohydrate, and we tend to have a lot of leftovers in the house, so I'm usually eating something else. You can only eat so much food, right? Older food takes priority.
We used to have a bread machine and loved using my uncle Fritz's awesome white-bread recipe, but then Mom couldn't eat white bread any more, and I didn't want to eat it in front of her. We tried switching to whole-wheat but the bread machine couldn't handle the dough and we got a lot of poorly-mixed adobe bricks instead of bread. We got rid of the bread machine and promised ourselves we'd make bread by hand when we wanted it.
Yeah. Right.
I've managed to squeeze in a few loaves, but I don't have as much time as I'd like, and I haven't liked the results. My mother swore by the honey-wheat recipe from Recipes for a Small Planet, but either I'm not doing it right, or we have different visions of what bread should be. I'm getting pretty typical homemade bread results, but not in a good way: Dense, heavy, kind of crumbly, and slightly sour. Bread that cracks and falls apart when you put sandwich fillings between slices of it. Uncle Fritz's white bread doesn't do that.
Sally got me inspired, though. I printed off a couple of recipes and decided I'd give it a whirl this weekend, when I'd be home to make sure nobody messed with my dough.
I meant to try the 100% whole-wheat version but discovered that the box of wheat gluten I had in the pantry was both antediluvian, and had not been stored properly. There were dead bugs in it, too. I guess extra protein helps the yeast act, but I think the gluten is enough and that bugs are sort of excessive. However, I really wanted to start the dough tonight, so instead of doing all-whole-wheat, I used 2/3 bread flour and 1/3 whole-wheat.
I also discovered that I only had active dry yeast and that the recipe I was using wanted instant yeast. I had no idea there were so many kinds of yeast. This was clearly a job for Google Man.
Several Google results said that, to substitute active dry yeast for instant, I needed to use 25% more and proof it first. OK. No problem.
(I time-stamped it to minimize as much as possible any further chances of my screwing it up.)
Italy was great, because good bread (often accompanied by good cheese) was around every corner. Home, not so much. I mean, we do have good bread here, but very little of it shows up in my kitchen. My mother is diabetic and doesn't eat a lot of carbohydrate, and we tend to have a lot of leftovers in the house, so I'm usually eating something else. You can only eat so much food, right? Older food takes priority.
We used to have a bread machine and loved using my uncle Fritz's awesome white-bread recipe, but then Mom couldn't eat white bread any more, and I didn't want to eat it in front of her. We tried switching to whole-wheat but the bread machine couldn't handle the dough and we got a lot of poorly-mixed adobe bricks instead of bread. We got rid of the bread machine and promised ourselves we'd make bread by hand when we wanted it.
Yeah. Right.
I've managed to squeeze in a few loaves, but I don't have as much time as I'd like, and I haven't liked the results. My mother swore by the honey-wheat recipe from Recipes for a Small Planet, but either I'm not doing it right, or we have different visions of what bread should be. I'm getting pretty typical homemade bread results, but not in a good way: Dense, heavy, kind of crumbly, and slightly sour. Bread that cracks and falls apart when you put sandwich fillings between slices of it. Uncle Fritz's white bread doesn't do that.
Sally got me inspired, though. I printed off a couple of recipes and decided I'd give it a whirl this weekend, when I'd be home to make sure nobody messed with my dough.
I meant to try the 100% whole-wheat version but discovered that the box of wheat gluten I had in the pantry was both antediluvian, and had not been stored properly. There were dead bugs in it, too. I guess extra protein helps the yeast act, but I think the gluten is enough and that bugs are sort of excessive. However, I really wanted to start the dough tonight, so instead of doing all-whole-wheat, I used 2/3 bread flour and 1/3 whole-wheat.
I also discovered that I only had active dry yeast and that the recipe I was using wanted instant yeast. I had no idea there were so many kinds of yeast. This was clearly a job for Google Man.
Several Google results said that, to substitute active dry yeast for instant, I needed to use 25% more and proof it first. OK. No problem.
(I time-stamped it to minimize as much as possible any further chances of my screwing it up.)
The house is cold, so I put it in the oven with the light on to keep it warm overnight. We'll see what I get in the morning.
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