My First Bread Adventure

Bread making? Why not, my family loves bread.

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my first bread

It all started with my retirement, how else would I have the time to make bread; and thanks to my dear sister, who treated me to the first home-made bread, fresh from the oven, oops … …fresh from the bread maker. The aroma of freshly baked bread and oh… those crunchy, tasty bread crusts, I definitely never tasted crusts like these before….. even hijacked some additional crusts from my niece. Anyone who loves bread could never say, no ….to freshly baked breads.

Do I have a bread maker, sadly no. Thinking of getting one though, but how often would I be making breads, would I get too lazy once the novelty wore off? So does my love for bread making matches that of eating fresh breads?

I started looking through my limited bread recipes, mine you, I have not baked any breads before. What I need is something simple, not too complicated for my first time, and that could be pop into the oven without a loaf pan.

The Adventure Starts

The recipe, simply ‘The Bread’, that I got from the internet seems to fit what I was looking for.  The only thing I have to buy is yeast; I do not have to look further than my kitchen for the rest of the ingredients.

The Bread

Ingredients :
2 cups of hot water	2 tsp. salt	½ tsp. oregano
2 tabsp dry active yeast	1/3 cup vegetable oil	5-6 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar	½ tsp garlic powder

Method

1. Mix all ingredients except the flour together.
2. Then add 2 cups of flour and mix well for about 2 mins.
3. Slowly add the rest of the flour, one cup at a time.
4. Knead well.
5. Place the dough in a well oiled/buttered bowl, turn over the dough so that the top of dough is greased. Cover it and let it rise in a warm place for 1 hour.
6. Turn the dough onto a floured board, knead and divide the dough into 6 balls.
7. Form balls into thin ropes; braid them on a well oiled cookie sheet. Tuck bottom ends in.
8. Let rise for another 30 minutes.
9. Bake at 375 deg. (190 deg C) for 15-20 mins.

I would like to apologize for not having the original recipe, as I was unable to revisit the website.

 

While preparing for lunch this morning, I could not help thinking about when will I be motivated enough to open that packet of yeast that I had bought.

As the original recipe, looks too much for starters, I decided to start off with half the portion and instead of following the exact recipe, I thought I could proof the yeast first.

Instead, I killed the yeast with water that is too hot.

Wondering whether it was my own stupidity or the yeast that has been on the shelf too long, I decided to try to proof the yeast again and this time round, I used warm water instead of hot water, and voila…. the mixture foamed beautifully after ten(10) minutes. Although the original recipe asks for hot water, the mixture of the first seven(7) ingredients (excluding the flour only) would not be hot enough to kill the yeast.

Other than some minor glitches, the rest of my bread preparation proceeded satisfactorily.

Some things to look out for

Using cup measurements was not so accurate for me and I found that my dough a bit wet and had to add more flour to make kneading easier. Maybe it would be better if I had converted the cup measurements to weights,

You could check out this very useful website for more conversions. http://www.jsward.com/cooking/conversion.shtml

Ingredient	1 cup	1/2 cup
Flour, all purpose (wheat)	120 g	60 g
Flour, well sifted all purpose (wheat)	110 g	55 g
Sugar, granulated cane	200 g	100 g
Confectioner's sugar (cane)	100 g	50 g
Brown sugar, packed firmly (but not too firmly)	180 g	90 g
Butter	240 g	120 g
Vegetable shortening	190 g	95 g

I decided to bake a trifle longer because of the wetness and find the crust a little bit too brown. I could not help wondering about the flavour as I had substituted the oregano with some mixed spices.

 My First Home-Made Bread

I love it, it looks great and it tastes great. It won me a couple of fans too.