TWD: White Loaves

My only experience with homemade bread is from a few years ago.  A woman that I worked with came to work one day and announced that she'd brought me some fresh baked bread that she'd made herself.  Between you and me, I thought it was odd, considering I'd never asked her for bread, or for anything that she cooked for that matter, and I didn't even know she baked bread.  On top of all that, I've never been much of a bread person, so if I ever asked for anything, bread wouldn't be it.  But the woman brought me bread, from her kitchen, that she made.  So I took the bread.  I ate the bread.  I was not wowed by the bread, but in my mind, it was just bread, and like I said, I've never been a fan of bread.  So, when it was time to make my own bread, I had mixed emotions.

I'll be honest.  I don't have my book.  Don't kill me.  I ordered it and it didn't come in time, so I went online and found the recipe.  I actually found several blogs that had made the recipe before and I cheated a little by stealing some of their tips.  For instance, I don't own a stand mixer and every blog strongly recommended it.  Now while I'd love to have a stand mixer and I do plan to buy one at some point, I wasn't quite ready to drop $500 just to make bread this one time, so I found a blog that gives instructions for mixing and kneading with a wooden spoon and good old elbow grease.  While, TWD rules prevent me from listing the recipe here, you should check out PTITCHEF's blog.  She has some pretty cool stuff.

As I was reading several of the blogs, one of the comments I read was how difficult it was to find the 8X4 pans the recipe called for.  One blogger who apparently makes a lot of bread said that she settled for a 9X3, which sounds weird, and that none of her loaf pans match, so when I found 4.4X8.4 loaf pans at Wal-Mart for $0.96, I bought five of them.  I don't know, people.  I'm a little crazy.

So time to make the loaves.  I actually enjoyed making bread, even the old fashioned way mixing with a wooden spoon and kneading with my hands, wasn't so bad.  It was actually very simple and pretty easy.  I will say I did make one small, okay, incredibly large boo boo.  I forgot to add the sugar.  According to the recipe I followed, I was to add the yeast and sugar into a half cup of water.  Don't ask me how I forgot this, because I totally mies en plas'd my butt off before even attempting to cook.  So when I was waiting the first 45 minutes for the dough to rise, I began cleaning up and noticed one little ramekin with a tablespoon of sugar.  There weren't a whole lot of options, so after the dough rose, I folded the sugar in.  Kinda, sorta.  I tried.

I found a few tricks for how to make the dough come out like an actual loaf, as opposed to a misshapen log.  The first tip said to form the dough into a log and let it sit 15-20 minutes.  After that time to shape it into a long rectangle and place in the pan.  The second tip, the one I actually tried, said to shape the dough into a rectangle, and the roll it up, starting from the top of the rectangle, and then seal the seam by pinching it together.  Place the bread in the pan, pinched side down.  As you look in my pictures, you'll see that one loaf is almost perfect while the other looks like a misshapen log.  Well, what happened, was, I did the nice looking loaf first and honestly, I'm not used to making bread and my hands were pretty tired, so I got lazy with the whole rectangle and pinching thing.



















All in all, I really enjoyed making the bread.  I will probably make it at least one more time to see how much difference the sugar made.  I ended up keeping one loaf for myself and I gave one to my friend so I could have an honest opinion about how my bread tastes.  I didn't tell her about my mishap with the sugar.  She said that the bread was really good and that there was a sweetness to it, almost as if it had been dusted with sugar.  Lol.  I guess that what happened when I tried to fold it in at the end.  Please visit slush or Someone's in the Kitchen for the full recipe.  :-)