bread

Everyday sandwich bread

/ Christine Pennylegion

I’ve been baking bread from scratch for the past two years or so, ever since my breadmaker vibrated itself off the counter in a gory suicide during a kneading cycle one day. After many different recipe tweaks, I’ve finally nailed my perfect everyday sandwich bread. Have at ‘er.

Ingredients (makes two 40% whole wheat loaves):

  • 2 cups lukewarm water
  • 2.5 tsp active dry yeast
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 heaping Tbsp bread booster (I use Fleishmann’s)
  • heaping 1/4 cup wheat germ
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 2 cups whole wheat flour
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour

Method:

1. Add lukewarm water to a medium mixing bowl. Add yeast; allow to sit for a few minutes. Add salt, bread booster, wheat germ, and oil.

2. Add flours directly on top of wet ingredients. Mix by hand until dough starts to form a ball.

3. Knead for 5-10 minutes until dough is smooth and springy. I don’t usually need to flour my surface.

4. Return dough to bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise for 40-60 minutes or until doubled in size.

5. Punch dough down. Grease two loaf pans. Briefly knead the dough and shape into two loaves. Let rise, covered, in the pans another 40-60 minutes.

6. Bake at 350F for 40 minutes or until the crust reaches your desired colour.

Basic white sandwich bread

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments
I had a lot of trouble finding a good basic white bread recipe that didn’t include any sugar. So I made my own. Here you go.

 

 

BASIC WHITE SANDWICH BREAD (makes 2 loaves)

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups lukewarm water
  • 2.5 tsp active dry yeast
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/4 cup canola oil
  • 5 cups all-purpose flour, plus up to 1 additional cup during kneading

1. In a mixing bowl, combine water and yeast. Let rest approximately five minutes.

2. Add salt and oil.

3. Add flour, one cup at a time. Mix with a wooden spoon, or your hands. Dough will be somewhat sticky.

4. Spread a generous amount of flour on your kneading surface. Turn dough out and knead 8-10 minutes until elastic and very smooth. Add additional flour as needed during this process. By the end the dough should be unsticky enough that you don’t need any flour under it.

5. Place dough in oiled mixing bowl, cover with plastic wrap or bag, and let rise in a draft-free place for 30 minutes or until doubled in size. I use my cold oven for proofing and it works well.

6. Punch down dough, turn out, and knead approximately 1 minute. Separate into two halves, shape into loaves, and place in bread tins (grease if necessary). Cover loosely with plastic and let rise in a draft-free place an additional 30 minutes.

7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bake loaves for 35 minutes, or until nicely browned on top and hollow-sounding when you tap the bottom. Remove to cooling racks and let cool completely before slicing.

Meet Sheryl

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

No, Sheryl isn’t Tertia’s real name. Sheryl is my sourdough starter. That’s right; I’m becoming one of those people.

A few months ago, my bread machine committed suicide by dramatically leaping off the kitchen counter in the middle of a knead cycle, thereby shattering itself into about seven pieces. It was pretty spectacular. Anyway, since then I have been baking our sandwich loaves most weeks, and I’ve really enjoyed doing it. Baking bread is something that always seems like a larger job in my head than it is in reality; it takes a long time, but very little of that time is active. And kneading dough is very satisfying! I love the way you can feel it transform under your hands.

Anyway, the sandwich bread is just a regular wheat bread made with commercial yeast. But yeast can be kind of pricey (and, apparently, subject to quarantine-related panic buying) and keeping track of how much I have is annoying, especially when the jar is almost gone and there’s not quite enough for another full batch of something. Which made me think, well, why not give sourdough a shot?

I followed this method from The Kitchn to make my starter, which took about five days. At first nothing dramatic was happening — I had little bubbles but not much of that good yeasty smell — but then on day four I could smell the sour yeastiness I was hoping for, as well as the alcohol created by the bacterial action. (I wonder: is sourdough moonshine a thing?) And then on day five — pow! Sheryl had doubled in size overnight and was ready to rock.I knew I wanted to do an overnight rise and bake in the morning, so I followed this recipe, which is literally just the first result I got when I searched for “overnight sourdough bread”. The active time is even shorter than it is with a commercial yeast bread. I measured out some starter, water, flour, and salt, and mixed it with my hands for about a minute. This is what it looked like at that point, as it rested for thirty minutes:

After the dough rests, you gently stretch it and fold it over on itself for about a minute. You can immediately see the difference in the texture between the last picture and this next one: from dry and crumbly we have moved on to stretchy and hydrated.

After that… not much happens for quite a while. The recipe says to let it rest for eight hours; my dough rested for closer to sixteen, which didn’t appear to do it any harm. (The longer rise probably helped, in fact, since we keep our house on the cool side.) But in the morning, it had smoothed out and bulked up, as promised:

When I was ready to bake, I took the loaf out and quickly shaped it. Now, next time I will transfer the dough into an oiled clean bowl before leaving it overnight, because it was really hard to get the dough out of its bowl without squishing it and popping the interior bubbles. It was very and I ended up leaving some behind in the bowl. But what was left had a nice rest before I popped it into the oven. I don’t have a proper Dutch oven for baking; fortunately, my casserole dish also does the trick.

And here is the result!

You may be able to see right by the bottom crust that it’s a little underdone there and could probably have used a few more minutes in the oven. But I am supremely happy with this first attempt! The bread is chewy and tangy, and tastes amazing toasted with some butter and cinnamon sugar. Sheryl and I? I think we’re going to get along.