Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

Everyone needs to try! Tricia started and now she gets why it’s so good.

Here’s links to:
Johno’s amazing whole wheat recipe - I’m sold, even though it takes a while. It’s worth it to breakdown the whole wheat flour into amazing flavor. Some things are worth the wait

A post with some of my newbie bread baker lessons learned

Another post with more lessons learned and helpful advice from Johno

If so, please leave a comment with your results so Johno can read them all and I don’t have to forward them.

Problems? Try Baking 911. It’s an informative troubleshooting site.

Thanks!

With permission, my blogpal, Johno from the Minstry of Minor Perfidy, has allowed me to reprint his original recipe for whole wheat bread. Try baking it on the weekend. Start in the morning and have loaves ready by dinner time! It is a commitment, but it’s worth it. Lately I’ve made it with a cup of regular whole wheat and a cup of white whole wheat in the first part and a cup of white whole wheat in the dry mix. It’s the King Arthur brand flour and it makes a lighter but still tasty bread.

Also, if you take his advice and work with a wetter dough, it will be lighter with bigger bubbles. It’s worth varying the wetness to figure out what kind of texture you want in the final product.

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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.