You never know how much bread is eaten until you actually start baking it yourself. We have a family of five here and there's always a teen or two extra at the house on occasion. I bake a loaf a bread from scratch with my handy dandy ancient slightly tired Kitchen Aid mixer pretty much every other day. My mixer moans and groans and threatens to come off the countertop every batch, but I refuse to let the Redneck replace it until it completely KICKS the bucket. It's lasted this long, roughly 10+ years, that it will make it a bit longer.
Bread....the staff of life or so they say. I make homemade white bread right now, but I've dabbled with grinding my own wheat for bread, honey wheat bread made from flour from the store, unbleached flour, all types of flour. My conclusion is if I'm baking it from scratch it's a heck of a lot better for you than the storebought stuff. I just threw some hamburger buns we bought about 2 weeks ago to the birds because they weren't being eaten and they weren't even moldy (growing) yet!
So this morning, to my amazement, I knew my recipe off the top of my head. I proudly acquired it from another blog and have adjusted it for my use. The original recipe and blog can be found here http://www.roxanashomebaking.com/white-sandwich-bread-recipe/. She explains how to create this bread rather well and that's one reason why I tried it.
My adjustment was I went from 1/2 cup of warm water for my yeast to a cup of warm water. Why? it just wasn't happy in ye ole mixer without it. This of course causes me to play with my flour content on occasion by adding more, but I'm okay with that. It makes a nice warm happy loaf of bread that keeps the kid critters coming back for more.
It takes me about 2 hours from start to finish to get a loaf of bread. Now I originally started doing my bread creations in ye ole ancient breadmaker, but I do not like the shape of the bread. I want a loaf of bread that is easy for sandwich making for the critters (kids). So on occasion, I make the bread dough in the breadmaker and then switch to the oven, but I have found that frankly its just as simple to do it in my Kitchen Aid and go from there.
So this morning I'm waiting on bread. I don't usually mind it, but I have errands to do and I'm motivated. So to keep from losing my motivation I'm writing a blog about bread and then I may consider housecleaning some and definitely wiping my counters down.
I have come to the conclusion that I need a bread cutting area in my kitchen. A place where I can leave the BREAD only cutting board out with a bread knife as well. Why? Because I wash every single one of my cutting boards at least once if not twice daily from the constant bread slicing and eating that happens around here. It may slow down with the children in school, but if you need a slice or want a slice since it's homemade, you have to slice it ;-).
I have debated pre-slicing but still haven't decided to go for it because the pre-slicing tools out there on the market have awful reviews and frankly I don't feel like taking the chance on messing up the entire loaf and having a kid whine about the slice job I did. I'll let them cut it so they can't complain!
So I'm off shortly to go buy more flour because my box is empty. Keep in mind my box holds 50 quarts of stuff. I have already planned on doubling my flour purchase this month because I'm at the bottom of the barrel so to speak!
Stay tuned as I try more bread recipes out and see what other culinary trouble I can get into!
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