Recipe!

I've been trying quite a few new recipes lately and thought I'd share what my family has enjoyed here and there. Not necessarily a regular column, but definitly something that will be repeated. I thought I'd start with my bread recipe. I got it from "America's Test Kitchen CookBook" and have adapted it to fit my ingredients and kitchen. It's yummy, and now that we are exclusively on homemade bread we eat it all the time - literally.

In 2 C. glass pyrex measuring cup:
1 C. Milk
1/3 C. Water
3 T. Butter/Margarine

Microwave for 1 min. 30 sec.

While liquid is in the microwave, add 3 T. honey to your mixer (mine's a KitchenAide, LOVE IT, and recommend it to those who make a lot of bread).

Pour liquid over the honey in your mixer. Add 2 1/2 tsp. yeast, 2 tsp. salt and mix with the bread hook dough. Slowly add 1 C. all-purpose flour and 3 C. bread flour (bread flour is the secret to good homemade bread, took me a few years to figure this out, but it does make a HUGE difference). Mix thoroughly until dough pulls away from sides of the bowl.

Flour your counter top and pour your bread dough onto the counter. Knead by hand on the counter, adding more flour until dough is no longer sticky and to desired consistency.

Spray bowl with cooking spray, put your dough in the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until double (about an hour).

Punch down, shape into loaf and put into sprayed metal loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise, again 'til double in size or to desired size of loaf. Heat oven to 350 degrees, along with a bread pan that's half full of water. This keeps the humidity in the oven high so the crust isn't too hard or over cooked. Bake for 35 mins.

Remove from oven and from bread pan onto a wire rack. While still warm, rub the outside of the loaf with butter/margarine.

This recipe freezes well, see my previous posts abour freezing bread dough.

Bread Dough Update

Just an FYI, you CAN freeze bread dough! I just let it rise once, punch it down, wrap in saran wrap and put in a bread pan and freeze until hard. Then wrap it again in tin foil and put in a freezer bag until later. When I notice I'm running low on bread I take the dough out of the freezer, leave it wrapped up and put in a bread pan to thaw in the fridge. I usually do this the night before, so the next morning I put the thawed dough into a greased bread pan and let it rise covered lightly with saran wrap. This is really good to do on Saturday evening, so when we head to church on Sunday morning, it's all ready to cook when we get home. Then we can have a warm loaf of bread with our "Sunday Meal", which is usually some good comfort food.

Bread Dough Experiment

I've been trying to save some money by making our own bread. It actually has been coming out really yummy (you have to use bread flour for good bread dough - took me years to figure this part out), but the biggest hassle is always having the time to make it when we run out. I just searched online to find out exactly how to do it. There seems to be no one set way to do it, except the general consensus is to defrost overnight in the fridge before allowing to rise at room temp. Since school is still out today, I think I'll do the big bread dough experiment...I'll let you know how it turns out!