Baking
For the last week I’ve been baking bread like crazy. After buying 20 pounds of flour I decided that there was no excuse for me to spend $3 or more on a loaf of bread (I could buy the cheap stuff, but I just don’t like it) when I’m perfectly capable of baking it myself.
The problem is that either my house is just too cold for bread to rise properly, I’m picking bad recipes, or I just suck at baking whole wheat bread. Every loaf of wheat bread I’ve baked has either been too dry, too dense, too tasteless, or just plain too small for sandwiches.
The one bread recipe I’ve been successful with is a bit too sweet for every day and the ratio of white flour to whole wheat flour is too high. I found a similar recipe that called for a higher ratio of wheat flour. But again, it didn’t rise enough and it was so dense it tasted like it hadn’t quite been cooked all the way.
I browsed the King Arthur Flour site and found a recipe for white bread that only had a few ingredients. It seemed easy enough and since it called for all white flour I figured I had a better chance of making it work. I also decided to knead it myself instead of mixing it in my stand mixer. I love my Kitchenaid, but if I’m really going to learn how to bake bread properly I figured I needed to get a feel for how dough should feel. It worked. The bread rose and it was fluffy and not too dry or dense. But as it cooled it sunk in the middle. For once it seemed I over-proofed it instead of under-proofing it. And it was white. For the most part I just don’t have a taste for white bread. It reminds me of paste.
Back to square one.
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