I’m back! I am terribly sorry to have been MIA this past week, but I do have a life. I am a part-time transcriptionist from home (for the famous blogger) and have been working on a project for the last week that has eaten into every nap-time. I have had time to bake bread Whole Wheat Bread again though, and let me tell you – I have enjoyed relishing my first real bread baking success. The last loaf I made did taste good, but the texture was lacking, leaving me no choice but to set out to perfect my technique. Last week’s loaf was heavy – this week’s, soft and much lighter. Last week’s loaf was mis-shapen – kind of like an oblong mushroom. This week’s would have made any artisan baker proud. The difference? My dear friends – let me enlighten you.
1) Spooned, not Scooped.
I never would have thought of this, had I not compared notes with a lovely, bread-making mother of six from our church. This woman has the bread thing down. She makes bread every day. When I mentioned the heavy, dense loaf I’d produced last week, she told me to spoon the flour into the measuring cup, and then level it off, rather than dipping the cup in the container and scooping it out. You get a packed cup of flour using the latter technique, causing the bread dough to be drier. So I spooned – and you know what? It worked! The dough was the perfect consistency – not dry and tough.
2) I used my oven as a “rising cabinet”.
I have a very cold house. It was built in the 1930’s, and is quite drafty. Add to this the fact that our highs have been in the 20s and you don’t have a very good climate for yeast to rise. Enter my eager-beaver oven. I talked with it about whether it would like to help with this process, and it immediately began warming. I tell you, this machine should give motivational seminars. The trick (according to the queen of all cooking texts, The Joy of Cooking) is to turn your oven on (about 200 degrees) until you can just feel the heat, and then turn it back off, shutting the door so as not to let any heat escape. I put my dough in the slightly warmed oven, and it rose in exactly the amount of time that the recipe predicted.
3) I used the slow method.
I know that I have been a proponent of the “faster is better” mentality, but I decided to slow down and use the type of yeast that the recipe called for. (What a concept!) I used active dry, and this made the real difference in texture if you ask me. It did take 1 hour longer than it might have with the Rapid-Rise, but it was worth it. Here’s what I learned – Rapid-Rise yeast is activated differently than active dry. There are recipes in my cookbook that call for Rapid-Rise, and it is handled differently. The folks that wrote the book must know what they’re doing. I think I’ll believe them from here on out.
4) I learned how to shape loaves.
You can’t, I learned, just drop a ball of dough into a loaf pan and expect a beautifully shaped loaf to emerge. My oven does lots of things, but has no powers in the realm of loaf-shaping. My recipe makes two loaves, which (according to the book) should be shaped by pressing the piece of dough into a rectangle and then rolling it up like a large scroll, compressing the ends and tucking under the excess dough as you place it in the pan (seam side down). Also – did you know that the short ends of the bread dough must make contact with the ends of the pan to support it during rising? Me neither. You learn something new every day.
