Day #18: Bread Obsession
Last year, I dusted off a fancy tangerine KitchenAid Artisan mixer that we've had for over a decade. It was a wedding gift that B and I received that was sitting in storage until we had more space in the kitchen. In short, 13 years later, we finally have the room in our kitchen to do such things.
That is when my obsession with bread (and baking, I suppose) began. This was the very first bread I made with the help of our mixer:
It made our house smell so good. I wonder if that was the source of the obsession. I love the smell of fresh baked bread. It was a pretty decent bread. I followed the recipe straight from the KitchenAid recipe book that the mixer came with. I followed it to a tee.
B asked if I had watched any videos on how to bake bread. I had not. We have very different styles when approaching new things. I like to follow one set of directions given to me. Perhaps do the same thing over and over, making many mistakes, baking many regrets, until I feel comfortable enough to adjust. B likes to research. A lot. When it comes to cooking, he will look at many different recipes, watch a whole bunch of youTube videos and come to his conclusion of how he will make the thing. He also repeats the making of the thing and adjusts as needed, but with him, he'll adjust almost immediately.
(I just realized that I started this blog post to share the recipe of the most recent bread made in our house and I've become one of those annoying recipe sharers that writes a whole novel before sharing the recipe. HA. I get it now. I'm going to be nice though and share the recipe here - not make you scroll all the way down. If you want to skip this novel, here's basically the recipe we followed - it's important to read the rest of it to see how we adjusted and how you will need to adjust as well.)
We used the same recipe for that first one as we did for this that my 12 year old, L, made yesterday. It looked and tasted much better.
The plan is to explain how we got from the first "meh" bread to the fantastic miracle we made yesterday. So stay tuned, but then again, note the title of the blog.
So from the first time I made bread last year, I might have made bread a couple more times after. Not as much as I thought I would. I have however started watching youTube videos about bread making, saving various bread recipes, looking to find a common thread on what made their bread so good. Not everything is, or can be, in all honesty, mentioned in the recipes we read online or in cookbooks. The videos do a little better because despite following the recipe, the bakers always share some nugget of wisdom. A simple step that they barely consider significant enough to include explicitly in the recipe.
Two Three Four Five things that we did that deviated (more like things we did to enhance the recipe) from the original recipe, based on my mistakes, tons of youTube videos and comparing different recipes, which we still used as our guide:
1. Include a pan of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven and put the bread you bake in the center rack. This is supposed to add steam to give the crust crunch.
2. Spritz some water on the bread when you first put it in the oven.
3. Brush water on the bread before you score it to make it easier to cut
4. Adjust the temperature and the length of time you keep the bread in your oven.
5. Rotate the baking sheet half way through the baking time
So based on our oven, instead of baking the bread for 25 straight minutes, at about minute 12-13, we rotate the pan. At the 25 minute mark, we did take out the bread to brush on the egg white BUT when we put the sheet back in the oven, instead of taking it out after 5 minutes, we checked on it every five minutes until the bread looked the golden brown it was supposed be. You need time and patience for this.
The pay off is delicious.
That is when my obsession with bread (and baking, I suppose) began. This was the very first bread I made with the help of our mixer:
It made our house smell so good. I wonder if that was the source of the obsession. I love the smell of fresh baked bread. It was a pretty decent bread. I followed the recipe straight from the KitchenAid recipe book that the mixer came with. I followed it to a tee.
B asked if I had watched any videos on how to bake bread. I had not. We have very different styles when approaching new things. I like to follow one set of directions given to me. Perhaps do the same thing over and over, making many mistakes, baking many regrets, until I feel comfortable enough to adjust. B likes to research. A lot. When it comes to cooking, he will look at many different recipes, watch a whole bunch of youTube videos and come to his conclusion of how he will make the thing. He also repeats the making of the thing and adjusts as needed, but with him, he'll adjust almost immediately.
(I just realized that I started this blog post to share the recipe of the most recent bread made in our house and I've become one of those annoying recipe sharers that writes a whole novel before sharing the recipe. HA. I get it now. I'm going to be nice though and share the recipe here - not make you scroll all the way down. If you want to skip this novel, here's basically the recipe we followed - it's important to read the rest of it to see how we adjusted and how you will need to adjust as well.)
We used the same recipe for that first one as we did for this that my 12 year old, L, made yesterday. It looked and tasted much better.
The plan is to explain how we got from the first "meh" bread to the fantastic miracle we made yesterday. So stay tuned, but then again, note the title of the blog.
So from the first time I made bread last year, I might have made bread a couple more times after. Not as much as I thought I would. I have however started watching youTube videos about bread making, saving various bread recipes, looking to find a common thread on what made their bread so good. Not everything is, or can be, in all honesty, mentioned in the recipes we read online or in cookbooks. The videos do a little better because despite following the recipe, the bakers always share some nugget of wisdom. A simple step that they barely consider significant enough to include explicitly in the recipe.
1. Include a pan of hot water on the bottom rack of the oven and put the bread you bake in the center rack. This is supposed to add steam to give the crust crunch.
2. Spritz some water on the bread when you first put it in the oven.
3. Brush water on the bread before you score it to make it easier to cut
4. Adjust the temperature and the length of time you keep the bread in your oven.
5. Rotate the baking sheet half way through the baking time
EVERY OVEN IS DIFFERENT!
So based on our oven, instead of baking the bread for 25 straight minutes, at about minute 12-13, we rotate the pan. At the 25 minute mark, we did take out the bread to brush on the egg white BUT when we put the sheet back in the oven, instead of taking it out after 5 minutes, we checked on it every five minutes until the bread looked the golden brown it was supposed be. You need time and patience for this.
The pay off is delicious.
(Day #19)
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