There’s still no cost tally on baking bread. I just don’t feel like tallying up grocery receipts and then tracking how many loaves of bread I got out of the last 5lb bag of flour. It’s not worth it to me since boyfriend also uses flour for recipes too. I’m sure it’s one of those things, like knitting and spinning, that will make me cry if I start adding in labor cost anyway. The reason is that I asked Minister of Baking and Fancy Prancing, Johno, of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy for some assistance and he gave me a crazy recipe with 4 rises. (How’s that for a new ministry title, sir? This is how I exact my revenge and offer thanks at the same time. muhahaha)
Johno actually was a fantastic resource for me. He read my post on bread baking and assuaged some of my concerns.
1. Overkneading will not happen with hand-kneading. That’s a caveat for machine mixing.
2. “It’s hard to kill yeast.” A verbatim quote from his email to me.
The other thing is my handy baker friend gave me some scientific explanations with his whole wheat recipe.
-He told me that honey is hydrophilic and so adding it will make a moister bread than adding sugar.
-Longer rises make for better flavor because the enzymes in the food have more time to break down the carbohydrates and make deeper, richer taste in the bread.
-Wetter is better for dough. Don’t add too much flour while kneading. This one has been really hard for me. The dough makes a huge mess. But on the other hand, I get much loftier rises out of the bread as well. We’re talking a SERIOUSLY light bread here. Before I was getting denser sandwich bread, now I’m getting bread that’s like a cloud. (I’m also allowing longer rises and not refrigerating the second loaf of dough. I am baking the second loaf and giving it away lately.)
It’s really shocking how little experimentation I’ve done and still gotten extremely good bread. I’ve made 4 batches now, 2 white, 2 whole wheat. I have gotten excellent reviews on the whole wheat. I took some to an ailing friend (recovering from major surgery) and she loved it with fresh butter in thin slices. The taste was really delicious and didn’t need much but the butter itself. Another loaf of whole wheat went to a crunchy-granola girlfriend of mine over the weekend because I am still quilting at her place. Again, rave reviews. This friend told me that growing up, she rarely had store-bought bread. They always had homemade bread at home. Hard for me to believe, but I think that’s pretty awesome.
I’ve found lots of things to do with bread which I’ll post up in the coming weeks. (I hope.)
And I’ll try to post the recipe later this week. Johno’s recipe is an original and yes, there really are 4 rises in the recipe. It’s quite a freakin’ commitment but he has offered a timeline for baking it too. The results are worth it.
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I’m excited about all your bread baking. My typical goal is to bake all of our bread and in the fall and winter I mostly managed that. However, that’s out the window in the summer because it’s too hot to turn on the over in our house. Maybe when I get that summer kitchen built I’ll bake this time of year. Glad you’re enjoying it so much!
It sounds like baking bread is so much fun from what you’re saying…
A couple of years ago I mentioned that my rye bread needed more rye flavor. Johnno sent me a couple of pages on pre-fermenting rye and thanks to him I now make a killer sourdough rye.
Wow, I used the word rye four, er five, times. That about doubles my annual usage rate. Rye, rye, rye, rye…
The book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg has some great everyday bread recipes in it. You mix it up and let it rise and depending on the recipe you can store the dough for up to two weeks. I still enjoy making more labor intensive recipes but this book has become my go to solution to weeknight bread.
I’ve tried to make bread at home and it’s been horrible!
My bf has a bread maker…but his bread is pretty flavorless…
I have the same problem as SavingDiva – it’s pretty bland and I haven’t been able to find spots in the apt with enough heat to let it rise. I’ve tried inside the oven and in my room near the window.
short answer is that a big loaf costs slightly under a buck for ingredients.
The slightly longer answer:
as to the cost of bread, with a 60% water-to flour ratio (this is with weighed ingredients, not ingredients by volume), I get 3.5 pounds of bread (two 1 lb 7.5 oz loaves) out of 2.4 pounds or 39 ounces of flour.
leaving aside other costs, this comes to 94 cents per loaf if flour costs .80 per pound.
(I use 39 oz flour, 22.5 oz of water, 2 Tablespoons of salt, sourdough starter, multiple risings, and time. And I mix and knead the dough in a breakmachine Ultimate I got for free on freecycle.)
BTW, baking by weight is so much more awesome and predictable in my experience than baking by volume measure.
YOu don’t need a super special warm spot to rise bread, actually, it will taste much better at room temperature (even down to 50) and just let it rise overnight.
Longer rise=better flavor.
you don’t need to coddle the stuff, but for each 10F drop in temp your rising time doubles (approximately).