Knead It Monday: Oatmeal Bread

You probably think by now that I sit around and brainstorm ways to totally mess up my breadbaking experiences. It may make good blogging material, but I am honestly just a girl who wants to make a decent loaf of bread but sincerely does that many dumb things in the kitchen. That being said, I had another weird bread adventure.

This week's loaf is also from the Reader's Digest Homemade book. I had such great success with the homemade pretzels, that surely their bread would be good, too!... Right? Right?

I baked this on the eve of that bad snowstorm that swept the Midwest. The recipe said that it was for one loaf of bread, but since I wanted two, I doubled the recipe. Herein was the first problem: the ingredients.


For a mere two loaves of bread, here are some of the ingredients I had to cough up:

• 3 cups milk
• 1 entire stick of butter
• 4 yeast packets (that's almost 1/4 CUP!!!!)
• 3 eggs (should have been 4, but I'm cheap :-P)

And when it came time to add all the flour and start kneading, I knew we had a problem:

This poor Jello is waiting to go to a good home after my pantry purge.

That is one GIANT lump of dough. I was sure that those Reader's Digest nincompoops had failed to test their own recipe, because this was obviously four loaves' worth of bread! I pulled out the two biggest pans I own, divided the dough, and set it to rise.

Since I only had three loaf pans, I called up my former-classmate-now-neighbor Rachel, who graciously lent me hers. It was only after this that I looked at the recipe and found out that I was actually supposed to knead the dough again after the first rise. This reduced the enormous puff of dough back into an enormous ball... that looked big enough for two loaves. Ugh.

But I was not about pour all those ingredients and that neighborly kindness into just two loaves, so I divided the dough into three pans. The end result?

Three of the most delicious loaves I've ever eaten, chewy and moist. And nicely-sized. I am still undecided as to the what original recipe was intended to yield-- was it really for a single loaf? 

The bread was absolutely scrumptious, but if you are looking to save money on baking your own bread, you will want to skip this recipe. I was really impressed by the texture, though, so I'll be sure to revisit oatmeal bread-- with a different recipe next time!

Knead It Monday: Eat your heart out, Auntie Anne's!

I hope that you are steadfast in your New Year's resolution to exercise, because this week, I made a snack that will CHANGE.YOUR.LIFE. In fact, it's so good, I'm going to lift the recipe out of the book and give it to you!

I have this Reader's Digest book called Homemade. It's full of all sorts of recipes for cleaning agents, condiments, and beauty products-- made from ingredients you most likely already have in your house. It's a fun read for anyone interested in frugality!

The book also has a section on making your own "fast foods and snacks". One of the first recipes is for delicious, homemade pretzels.


Someone actually beat me to violating copyright laws and putting it on the web, so here's the link to the recipe, should you want to make it. And trust me, you want to make it.

This recipe only makes six pretzels. Look how small a ball of dough it produced!

One nice thing about this recipe is that it only rises once. After you punch down the dough, divide it into six pieces and let the fun begin!

I did the obligatory traditional pretzel shape, but I couldn't resist getting a little creative.

Just in case there was some confusion over who got which pretzel. :-D

Before you put the pretzels in the oven, you need to brush them with melted butter and sprinkle with salt. I used coarse kosher salt, and it turned out beautifully. You can easily overdo it with the salt, so be careful! I also got adventurous and sprinkled a couple pretzels with onion powder. Best.decision.EVER!

When I bit into the first one hot from the oven, I was simultaneously sad that I didn't make like 200 more, and thankful that I didn't.

Hooray! So here is proof that I can actually make bread. Now go and make some pretzels.

Knead It Monday: Wherein Baby D Tried to Foil Me

Baby D decided that I wasn't making nearly enough posts about him, so he decided to totally hijack my breadmaking post today. In fact, even at this moment, he is being absolutely angelic for the first time today and is trying to lure me away with false promises of actually being happy today. Away, ye tempter!

So I decided to try my hand with the whole wheat recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It called for 1/3 cup brown sugar. Silly me, I decided I would have no need of any brown sugar in my Sugarless 2011, so I didn't bother refilling it when it ran out a few days before New Year's. So I substituted about 1/4 cup honey instead.

The directions requested that I mix the yeast with some of the flour, then heat the water, sugar, butter, and salt in a saucepan, and then add it to the yeast/flour mixture-- and then mix with a hand mixer for 3 minutes. I thought that was a bit odd, but I followed the directions (besides adding the salt; I thought I'd do that later, with the rest of the flour).

As I turned off the mixer, I heard a pathetic cry from the bedroom. That darn mixer had woken Baby D! So I let this weird yeast soup sit while I nursed Baby D back to sleep again. I tiptoed out, mixed in the rest of the flour and started kneading, when...

Baby D let me know in no uncertain terms that HIS. NAP. WAS. OVER.

So I washed all the gunk off my hands and brought him out. I finished kneading, put it to rise, and realized that I never remembered to add the salt. ARG.

Baby D was great until about ten minutes before I needed to punch down the dough. Then he made the mother of all messy diapers just as my mom called, so I was juggling a naked baby and a phone while the dough sat forlornly in the oven. I finally rescued it after a two-hour rise time, and separated it into two loaves. I forget why, but that also sat there for a while before I could put them into loaf pans for the second rise.

Fast forward to the end of the second rise, which also went way too long. Baby D was very angrily insisting that I feed him RIGHT NOW, and I was tired and hungry. For an instant, I started to take the loaves out of the oven so it could preheat for a few minutes, but I stopped with a very dignified, ladylike phrase: "Aw, SCREW IT!" I turned on the oven and let it preheat with the loaves inside and sat down with Baby D. Happy mom, happy baby, unhappy little loaves.

As you can guess, they didn't turn out the best. But one of the things I just love about homemade bread is that even when it doesn't come out perfect, it always comes out delicious, nonetheless! I might try this recipe again in the near future, but try mixing the yeast and water conventionally, and use brown sugar. And give Baby D away.

Just kidding about that last part, but I'd love it if he'd just sprout some teeth already.

Knead It Monday: The Spectacular Disaster

It only took three weeks into the new year to almost set the house on fire. It seems to happen almost every year, but I think I just set a new record! And guess what, it involved this week's bread.

I decided to mix things up this time and do something a little different: baguettes. I thought it'd be nice and easy to do, since it seems to be very comparable to tried-and-true Five-Minute Artisan Bread.

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Everything went well until the first rise. Usually, since the house is generally cold, I'll fire up the oven for about thirty seconds to get it warm, and then stick the covered dough in there. This time, when I checked the dough about halfway through the rising time, I thought the oven could be a little warmer, so I turned the oven on for another thirty seconds.

And then Adam called. I chatted with him, then cleaned a counter, and went to the bathroom. When I came out, the house was full of smoke.

I had forgotten to turn the oven off.

I pulled the dish out to find the towel badly singed and the dough partially cooked on top. The air was acrid with smoke from the rubberized bottom of the dish. Fortunately, the rest of the dish was metal, so I figured I could probably salvage my baguette plans.

Except, the bottom was cooked through.

So I grabbed the dough, greased a 9x13 pan, and threw the whole embarrassing lump into the oven, where it stayed for forty minutes or so.

The end result was a large, dense blob of bread. It tasted fine, so all was not lost-- in fact, it was really good toasted, accompanying a bowl of hearty vegetable soup later. As of this writing, the only testament to my botched baguettes are crumbs at the bottom of the 9x13, so I wouldn't call this a waste. If anything, I learned a valuable lesson: cell phones are dangerous to drivers and bread-makers alike. So don't text and bake!

This all happened Saturday. I wanted to try again before today, but I had to do other stuff that didn't actually place our lives in peril. Sometime later this year, I'll try my hand at baguettes again, but for now, there are many more different recipes for me to try! Come back next week for more Adventures in Breadmaking!

Knead It Monday: Whole Wheat Bread

This week, I made whole wheat bread. If I get nothing else out this 2011 bread challenge, the one thing I want is a great loaf of whole wheat bread. Every recipe of WW that I've ever tried produces a loaf that is dense and small; and by "every recipe", I mean the two recipes from my two favorite cookbooks that I tried time and time again before I concluded that those recipes were just not that great.

So this week, I thought I'd try my luck with allrecipes.com. I was having trouble finding high-rated recipes that didn't involve a bread machine, so I eventually just settled on this one and went with the directions in a comment for a handmade loaf.

I don't know if the apartment was too cold, or if the directions were weird, or if this is just an issue inherent with whole wheat, but once again, I ended up with a small, dense loaf. It was very tasty, though, and it was gone the next morning! It's really hard not to just inhale the entire thing when it's warm from the oven. :-)

I really need to study up more on making whole wheat bread, because this could just be an example of false expectations from eating store-bought bread. Is it possible to have a fluffy WW loaf? I don't know, but I will definitely be trying again!

Knead It Monday: Amish White Bread

For my first 2011 loaf of bread, I decided to go with a simple white bread. I'm not a huge fan of white bread, but Adam is. In fact, it's one of our little marital sources of contention. I even made a pie chart to demonstrate.

But I wanted to make something fairly uncomplicated, so I went to allrecipes.com and found this recipe for Amish White Bread. Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the original recipe for this "Amish" white bread called for a bread machine?

Right off the bat, the recipe called for a technique I had never tried before-- proofing. You mix the yeast, water, and sugar (yes, sugar! But I decreased it from 2/3 cup *gag* to 2 Tablespoons) and let it sit for about five minutes until the yeast gets all foamy. I took the picture after I added the oil, so that's what the blob is in the foam.

After rising, the recipe called for yet another technique I'd never done with bread before: kneading the dough after the first rise. Usually, my recipes call for chucking it right into the baking dish. But I kneaded it again, and set it out for the second rise.

They rose really well! I had a very good feeling about these loaves.

When I pulled them from the oven, I was elated! My number one problem with my breads are that they never rise much. These ones were by far the tallest loaves I've ever produced!

The one on the right looks like it needs to go on a diet. 

My one complaint is that they're somewhat mooshy inside-- maybe I should have baked them longer. And it's white bread. I just can't get past the lack of substance, even though this is way better than store-bought. I'm definitely going to have to cleanse my palate with a batch of whole wheat next week!

How do you like the little graphic I made for my weekly bread posts?