Summer Baking 6/20/10

My family makes awesome food. Between grandparents who owned a restaurant, a mom and 2 sisters, I got to tag along on a lot of exciting meals. I tend to borrow a lot from all of them: general Chinese cuisine awareness from my grandparents, stir-fry technique from my mom, vegetarian options from my sister Nicole, and a gourmet touch from my sister Lisa. Growing up, however, we were primarily a cookies family, with the occasional cake. Ever since we left Canada and its superior flour (according to my mom, at least), the bread machine has disappeared in our family, with most of our bread being of the "best thing since" variety. Having developed enough cooking skill to avoid food poisoning and live at a subsistence level, I thought I would try to develop some particular skill that hasn't been big in the family yet, and I chose baking bread.

I'm still not sure whether it's supposed to be hard or not. And yes, there are some things that aren't hard, such as making Kraft mac 'n cheese. I've had this as a project for awhile, and my mom helped me pick out the last bread book I should ever need: "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, Soups, and Stews." It's a combination of his bread book and his soup and stew book, with just about 1000 pages. I read the prep section and looked over the recipe for "the first loaf" ahead of time to make sure that I had the time and ingredients to make it for the potluck, and it didn't seem so hard. Let's discuss how it went.

The recipe appears to be a basic white bread. Nothing fancy added and hopefully simple enough to start with. The initial part went well. I didn't kill my yeast, though I'm also not sure if I got my water warm enough since my dough failed to "double in bulk" as expected. Before that, though, my first mistake came in the initial mixing. I perhaps become overzealous in getting to work with the dough, and while it was still very wet, I began mixing with my hands since I was reading the "by hand" method. Unfortunately, I missed the verb in the instructions, which specifically said to "beat by hand." Oops. I lost some my ingredients when I went to wash my hands off, though after that, things went better.

When it came around to the end, I pulled the bread from the oven, and it looked and smelled pretty good from the outside.

After my initial test, however, I found that the bread was quite dense. I guess that's okay if you like your bread doughy, but it wasn't quite the result I was hoping for.

I am not entirely sure why it happened, though I have many theories, including not baking enough, adding too much flour, and not kneading enough. The primary suspect, though, was the lack of rising. As I mentioned, I couldn't really tell if my dough had "doubled in bulk," which I think means that it didn't. I don't have a cooking thermometer to know how to treat my yeast, though hopefully I'll learn through experience.

I'm hoping to bake at least once a week, maybe twice a week on good weeks. The unfortunate part is that baking bread takes a long time, and I can't see myself being able to prepare it in time for dinner at any point on a weekday. Tips on time management welcome!

As a final note, you should all also check out Holly's baking blog at http://hollyho.tumblr.com/. Holly is an awesome baker, and maybe she's too modest to hawk her other work here, but I'm not. Get excited: there's food talk everywhere.