Bread for Friends

Possibly my only reader demanded bread to be brought to a lunch she was providing for our family. It would have been churlish to refuse and I find the giving of bread to be a more than acceptable declaration of affection for friends and family and a lot less hassle and risk than making a cake.

I was a bit distracted on Saturday, and bread is always best when as fresh as possible, so as soon as I awoke, I got up and put the bread maker on (usual recipe below). By the time three of us were ready to go the park, the other two having gone swimming, the maker had beeped and I could leave the pan on the side to rise until we got back.

On our return, I knocked it back, cut it into two, shaped both parts into a sausage, put them into the oven (220 degrees) for 25 mins whilst we got ready to leave.

My reader was delighted with the bread:

And lunch was lovely - chicken, chorizo and potatoes all roasted together served with salad, and bread. Apparently it's a Nigella recipe and I can thoroughly recommend it.

More importantly however, was that she had baked a cake which we enjoyed after a trip to the park (for the children and husbands) and a meander round the shops (for myself and my friend). I think she was quite keen to see a picture of it on my blog, so here it is:

Regrettably the picture does not do it justice. There were some comments that it was a bit too sweet, but not from me.

Unintended Loaf

I hadn't intended to make bread today, but I was going to put the oven on anyway (lentil and squash shepherds pie, a variation on a recipe from River Cottage Every Day which I've been unable to find on the web) and when I looked in the bread bin, yesterday's loaf was almost gone.

Today it was 461gms white flour to 39gms wholemeal - precise? No, just the remains of the bag of white flour I had open, topped up with wholemeal (also open).

To begin

If you're a purist you're probably going to be happiest elsewhere.

My recipe of the moment is:

375 mls water
500 gms flour
1 1/5 teaspoons salt
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast

which is a recipe for baguettes taken from Bread: Baking by hand or bread-machine. My baguettes have nearly all looked and tasted more like ciabatta so in the end, I stopped trying to shape them (although you can get baguette trays, I don't know where I'd store it) and just bunged them in a standard bread tin.

Today I've gone for 400 gms white bread flour and 100 gms wholemeal flour and it's all in the breadmaker as I write. I use a breadmaker as I literally don't like to get my hands dirty, particularly not with the goo that occurs on first mixing the flour and water. My aim in life is to balance the ingredients so that I can pull a nice smooth dough out of the breadmaker in one lump, bash it about a bit with none sticking to me or anything else and pop it in the tin.

When I first started to make the baguette-style bread, I did do all the rising given in the recipe, but to be honest it all took far too long. I soon discovered that you could actually just rise it once before putting it in the oven and on occasions when I've been really pushed for time it's gone straight to the oven from the breadmaker.

However, the main aim for making our bread is for sandwiches which are eaten on a nearly daily basis by the rest of the family. I remember when a nice organic wholemeal & seeds sliced loaf from Waitrose (when I could still afford to shop there on a regular basis) was 85p. Now you're lucky to get it for that price when it's reduced. I don't want to buy or eat rubbish bread, so I dusted off my breadmaker and occasionally produce something actually edible.

Initially I just did the whole loaf in the breadmaker, but after a while, the hole from the paddle gets annoying and if you weren't there to lift the lid immediately it would sink and it took hours to produce a loaf which seemed to last 5 minutes. There was also the small matter of some dough overflowing whilst unattended one day which possibly makes it dangerous to allow the maker to bake any more.

So now, I make the dough in the breadmaker and bake it in the oven and mostly it works really well. I've recently started to allow the dough to rise in the bread tin before baking which makes for a more satisfactory sandwich bread (apparently), although I have to allow it to cook for longer at a lower temperature to make sure it's not soggy in the middle.