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Any other bread bakers?

LuGoJ

LuGoJ

Bluelighter
Joined
Dec 23, 2005
Messages
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Location
NYC
Any fellow BLers into baking bread? Ever since I got my standmixer I have been baking some sort of yeast bread every weekend. Mainly bialy's.

Going to attempt sour dough soon, just having trouble decided which recipe to try. Anyone have any suggestions? Preferably something with a decent fermentation.
 
I have no suggestions for you, but I have tried baking bread before with my girlfriend (she did most of the work, lol). The results were pretty damn good. We just made a no-thrills whole wheat bread.

The only type of bread I've made myself has been banana bread. :P
 
I made bread several times before! I dont know any good recipes right off the top of my head, but as long as you keep in mind that bread making is a chemistry and that you must follow the steps given in a recipe in order or you could mess it up!

One of my fav places to look at recipes is allrecipes.com

that have an easy search and tons of members who rate and comment on recipes, and you can find breads that range in difficulty to suit you.

if you find one that works i suggest you post the recipe for everyone else in The Recipe Thread!
 
I used to make sourdough bread. You can make sourdough starter from pretty much any starch. Basically it's a fermentation process by which "wild yeasts" are attracted from the environs. Here is one recipe http://www.breadtopia.com/make-your-own-sourdough-starter/ I am sure you can find countless others. I used to make mine with rye flour. The age of the starter and the bread recipe, itself, has much more to do with the flavour of the bread than what goes into the starter.

The flavour of the starter deepens and becomes more rich and complex over time. You have to renew it often or it goes rotten. IIRC you refresh it with new starches once a week. And don't do it even a day late! It doesn't take long for sourdough starter to go yucky and die. And it is quite disappointing to lose a very old starter because you forgot to refresh it one day. If you start by making a starter now and renew it for a few months, you will be happy with the resultant flavour :) You can keep the same culture going literally indefinitely, and the flavour improves each time it's refreshed and re-fermented. You can also use the starter in the first week, but the sourdough taste won't be very pronounced.

So that is the thing to remember with sourdough: patience. It can take anywhere from a week to many years to make a loaf. The leavening process is slow, too. IIRC, you can spend the better part of a day making sourdough if you don't add any regular yeast.

I can't personally recommend any recipes since my bread making days happened before my internet days. But just get a starter going now. And it doesn't even matter much what you make it with, IMHO. Then you will have some ready for whenever you find your awesome sourdough bread recipe.
 
I love love love sourdough bread <3

I've never made bread from scratch as an adult, but my grandmother used to bake her own bread (she never bought a loaf as far as i recall) and i used to help her. Man, i can still remember the taste of that bread. I have made bread in a breadmaker, but it's not the same as kneading the dough with your hands.
 
I love baking bread. My mum used to make her own bread when I was a kid and although there's decent bread around now (we only had the white soft stuff growing up), I still love to make my own. I don't like bread machines though - kneading it yourself is so satisfying and makes the best bread because you can feel the temperature and texture of the bread properly.

And I absolutely love sour dough bread - tried making that once and it tasted pretty good but didn't really turn out quite like traditional sour dough.
 
Never made sourdough, but I can make a good fluffy loaf of white bread that tastes great. I just can't pull off that nice hard European style crust with the nice fluffy interior.

Whole wheat bread is really tough to pull off too. I can only make that good if I put only about 1/4 parts whole wheat flour in with it. I'd love to make those exotic whole grain loafs full of things like sunflower and flax seeds.

Good luck with the sourdough. Correct fermentation is a tricky thing to pull off so be careful.
 
MyFinalRest said:
Never made sourdough, but I can make a good fluffy loaf of white bread that tastes great. I just can't pull off that nice hard European style crust with the nice fluffy interior.

Whole wheat bread is really tough to pull off too. I can only make that good if I put only about 1/4 parts whole wheat flour in with it. I'd love to make those exotic whole grain loafs full of things like sunflower and flax seeds.

Good luck with the sourdough. Correct fermentation is a tricky thing to pull off so be careful.
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I did the fermentation starter for a few days - it sure is tricky! There's a real knack to it ... I fussed over it and kept checking it but it didn't really work out like proper sourdough bread. I mean it was nice but didn't have that hard crust that I love. I might try it again soon as it's pretty warm here at the moment which is good sourdough weather from what I've read.
 
interesting thread, fresh baked bread in the morning is the best thing a guy can smell

i wanted to be an apprentice baker cus i thought it would be interesting changing around my sleeping pattern and i dont get out much aha, too many hoops to jump through though :<
 
Miss_vanilla said:
...didn't have that hard crust that I love. I might try it again soon as it's pretty warm here at the moment which is good sourdough weather from what I've read.
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supposedly the trick to getting a hard crust is brushing the loaf with cold water several times while it's baking? IDK? Never really worked for me like I wanted it to.

I'd say the humid warm weather of summer would be really good for the fermentation.

Anybody good with the whole wheat thing? Everytime I did it, I get good-tasting, but super dense rolls and bread. How do you get that nice fluffy texture with whole wheat like supermarket bread?
 
Wow, i completely abandoned this thread!

Over the past few month I have been baking every saturday and sunday morning, it's become my new hobby. I normally wake up pretty early but now it seems like I wake up earlier on the weekends than I do during the work week just so I can bake, sometimes 4:30 or 5! A few times I even thought about calling out of work so I could bake =D

This is a sour dough loaf I made a few weeks ago, the center was a little bit dense but I corrected that by letting it rise an extra 20 minutes the following weekend. I think I got nice coloring and scored the dough nicely though.

312ioll.jpg


This is a challah that I made last weekend, not bad for a first attempt.

29eltu.jpg



My wife is lucky, she gets to try all of this for breakfast every weekend!


@myfinalrest

You are close. Steam is what creates a nice chewy crust. Mist the loaf with a spray bottle before putting it in the oven, once it's in the oven use the bottle and spray the oven walls with the water to create steam then close the oven fast. Repeat this every 5 minutes, the more you do it the chewier the crust will be. For the sourdough loaf above I sprayed the oven a total of three times and it a good chew. Using a baking stone will improve your crust even more.
 
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Fuck! That fucking looks awesome. That Challah is probably out of this world! I tried making whole wheat again and fucking blew it! I was able to salvage it though by slicing it up and making toast that was pretty tasty. I'm never going to waste all that time and effort trying to make whole wheat again.
 
MyFinalRest said:
Fuck! That fucking looks awesome. That Challah is probably out of this world! I tried making whole wheat again and fucking blew it! I was able to salvage it though by slicing it up and making toast that was pretty tasty. I'm never going to waste all that time and effort trying to make whole wheat again.
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What's your recipe?
 
I think I used only 2 cups whole wheat this time w/ 4 cups unbleached bread flour plus yeast, water, and salt. Let it rise good both times and all that, but it just came out really dense, but tasted okay. Not using a bread machine either. Basically did the same stuff that makes a really good white bread loaf, except for the addition of whole wheat flour.
 
Were you kneading by hand or stand mixer? how long did you knead?
 
By hand. I don't time it anymore, so I'm not sure, but I just work it until it feels right and avoid overdoing it. I have heard about people putting some baking powder in it to help and some store bought whole wheat/whole grain has baking powder and usually "vinegar" and "soy lecithin" too listed in the ingredients.
 
I assume you are doing the windowpane test after you knead? I'm far from an expert but everything I am reading points to a gluten problem. Have you tried adding some vital wheat gluten?
 
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