Back to hand-made bread…

And yes, I do know I’m fickle. . .

Well, I’ve been making bread with my mixer for a couple of week now, and I’m not happy.

Its performance does leave something to be desired – in a nutshell, I have to intervene so much, to make sure all the flour is scraped down and incorporated into the dough, I may as well do it my bloody self. It’d be faster anyway. Seriously – by the time I’ve fed the flour a bit at a time into the mixer (as per instructions), I can have the damn thing mixed, kneaded and set aside for its first proving, doing it by hand

A mixer may come into its own when making several loaves at a time but, for one, not worth it. It’ll be good for high-hydration breads, when the dough is hard to handle, but for my normal 60% hydration loaves, it’s a tad pointless, I’m afraid.

I haven’t yet tried tossing everything in at once – that’s for another day.

Anyway, bread guru Peter Reinhart says

First attempt at using a mixer…

Not too impressed with my first attempt at using a mixer to mix and knead my dough – my conclusion is that I need a somewhat slacker dough with a mixer than by hand (i.e. more liquid). Also, making my normal, 1kg loaf isn’t enough dough for the machine to work properly, I think. Scroll down for an update re second loaf.

Both those things meant that the dough hook just picked up the dough and battered it against the sides of the bowl. Precisely the same problem as you get with a bread machine if the mix is too dry (looking back at my old machine recipes, hydration was almost 100% for some recipes – which was fine, as there was no need to handle the wet dough).

I’m also using a

My breadmaking progresses…

Happy New Year, folks!

2010 is going to be the year in which I get seriously into bread-making. OK, I can make pretty good bread already, but with having to work around the problems of my health, it can be difficult.

The first change is buying a mixer, which frees me from the problem of having a good day, healthwise, before I can bake. I was torn, as I’ve mentioned previously, between the Kenwood Chef Classic (white only),

and a fire-engine red KitchenAid Artisan. (The candy-apple red special edition is stunning.)

In the end, though, it was no contest. The

Choosing a mixing bowl…

This is a tip mainly for bread-makers  like me, who have to contend with ME/CFS, as well as the vagaries of beating bread dough into submission (or anyone, really, who is physically weak/sick or otherwise impaired, and bakes).

For more years that I care to remember, I’ve used a Mason Cash earthenware bowl for mixing pastry, or bread dough. However, a few months ago I switched to a 5 litre stainless steel bowl (I may have mentioned this elsewhere).

Bigger than the Mason Cash bowl, it has the room to work the dough until it’s all incorporated – then it can be tipped out onto the work surface in a neat lump, for kneading.

Today, though, I’d carelessly put something else in my steel bowl, so I had to

Mixed feelings…

As making bread is becoming problematic – lately I seem to need to make it when I’m having a bad day – I’m investing in a mixer.

The one I really like is the KitchenAid Artisan, but at £354 it’s just too expensive (though I’ve seen it for £299 and in the US it goes for the $ equivalent of about

Bread Bits, Part 6 – rambling about bread…

At Wellbeck, in rural Nottinghamshire there is a School of Artisan Food. I think that’s great. There must be many people, like me, who discover that they have a talent for something – in my case breadmaking –  and would like to take it further. They don’t offer a specific breadmaking course, but that may be a segment of the Baking course.

I certainly wish I’d discovered my own talent 30-40 years ago – with a school like this I may have been able to develop it to the point where I could make a living out of it. Now, at 65 and increasingly disabled, there’s not a lot I can do with my new-found skills except make bread for my own pleasure and consumption, and show off by giving loaves away.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

I have been asked to make

Weighed in the balance – and found wanting…

I was reading a bread-making website a few minutes ago, and I came to a page where the author was fulminating about the difficulties of using “English” weights and measures.

He bitches about different units for volume, weight, distance, etc, which is complete bollocks – even the metric system uses different units for those (litres, kilograms, and metres, for the hard of thinking – scaled up or down as required for different purposes), and the US, I might add, uses “our” units of measurements too – just not in cooking.

And as you’ve probably gathered, he’s an American, a nation congenitally incapable of grasping the concept of

A new standard loaf…

Some time ago, I wrote that I had settled on a standard, everyday, loaf – I was wrong. In breadmaking, as in so much else, standing still gets dull. True, I could turn out, reliably, a decent, crusty, white loaf – with occasional excursions into rye bread – but I felt my standard loaf could be better, and so it proved.

I’d intended sticking with the same 60% hydration as before, but somehow I cocked up the calculation, and in reality it was about 68% which, as it turned out, was a great improvement, both in texture and in keeping qualities. I also added 50g of wholemeal rye flour, for flavour. I made a change to my yeast starter, too, adding flour to it.

This is the recipe. There is actually

Floury crust on home-made bread…

This question was put to Nigel Slater in today’s Observer Magazine:-

How do I get a floury crust on my home-made bread?

His answer, to dust it with flour before the second proving, then leave it to its own devices, before baking, is wrong. No mention of slashing the bread, to allow it to expand in the oven, for a start. And I think dusting the bread with flour so early will cause the dough’s surface to dry out somewhat, impeding rising, because things happen more slowly in a relatively cool domestic kitchen than they do in a hot artisan bakery, where you might get away with that technique. You’d still have to

Honey, I burnt the bread…

I’m having a problem with bread. Of late, I’ve baked a couple of loaves late in the evening (normal temp/time – 200C/35 minutes). The first one I left to its own devices until the timer went off – the crust was so deeply browned – almost black in parts – a few more minutes would have trashed it completely.

Last night, I repeated the process, set the timer and retired to read part 2 of The Lord of the Rings – for about the 28^th time (these things matter to LOTR freaks!). Alarmingly soon, the smell of scorching bread began to permeate my flat – not too difficult as it’s about the size of a 3-car garage.

Into the kitchen, hauled out the well-tanned loaf, scrabbled for the cooling rack, and checked the timer – a mere