New Year's resolutions - new recipe, week 3 - Excellent White Bread
No overachieving this week with only one new recipe - unless you count baking with real, live yeast! For some reason, I've always been intimidated by the idea of baking with actual yeast. Somewhere down the line, I decided any recipe that required yeast required the absolute, perfect temperature liquid to get it to work, and that was way more precision than I was willing to deal with in a recipe. Once I learned that was patently wrong, though, I've been inching my way toward homemade bread, and last week, I took the plunge.
And it was TOTALLY EXCELLENT! Which is great, since the recipe promised as much: Excellent White Bread from the NY Times cooking website lived up to the hype of its name.
I'm a late comer to the baking and cooking scene, as Justin has done most of that for me over the last almost 20 years. One of the things I'm learning to embrace is to read the entire recipe all the way through and then gather everything together first, before you really start, to make the steps of the recipe much simpler along the way.
Once that was accomplished, I got to work, warming the milk to let the yeast dissolve and then adding the essential ingredients to form the dough. What fun to finally have an opportunity to use the dough hook on my KitchenAide! Again, having had the tool for all these years, there are still so many features I've never even tried.
Once machine kneaded and out of the bowl, I set the dough aside to rise and went out on a run. By the time I got back, it still hadn't risen sufficiently, so the whole process ended up taking longer than I had expected. Still, I was in no rush, and I didn't want to mess anything up with impatience. Finally, the dough had doubled in size and it was time to hand knead the dough ball.
And that was HARD!! Holy cow, I had no idea how much forearm power it took to properly knead bread dough!! Thankfully it was only for a few minutes, because if it had been longer, I might've pooped out. Ha! Finally, though, the dough preparation was done, and it was on to the last step before the actual baking of the bread: allowing it to rise in the pan.
The recipe made enough for two loaves but unfortunately, I only had one loaf pan, so I had to improvise with a free form loaf on a baking sheet. I figured if it didn't work out, we would have at least one that was done exactly to specifications. Luckily for me, though, it worked like a charm, and both loaves turned out beautifully!
I sliced off a small piece of bread right out of the oven, slathered it with butter and experienced the joy of both a job well done and the deliciousness of homemade bread. I will definitely come back to this recipe again - there is something heart and soul warming about homemade bread!
And it was TOTALLY EXCELLENT! Which is great, since the recipe promised as much: Excellent White Bread from the NY Times cooking website lived up to the hype of its name.
I'm a late comer to the baking and cooking scene, as Justin has done most of that for me over the last almost 20 years. One of the things I'm learning to embrace is to read the entire recipe all the way through and then gather everything together first, before you really start, to make the steps of the recipe much simpler along the way.
And that was HARD!! Holy cow, I had no idea how much forearm power it took to properly knead bread dough!! Thankfully it was only for a few minutes, because if it had been longer, I might've pooped out. Ha! Finally, though, the dough preparation was done, and it was on to the last step before the actual baking of the bread: allowing it to rise in the pan.
The recipe made enough for two loaves but unfortunately, I only had one loaf pan, so I had to improvise with a free form loaf on a baking sheet. I figured if it didn't work out, we would have at least one that was done exactly to specifications. Luckily for me, though, it worked like a charm, and both loaves turned out beautifully!
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