Apparently, I AM a Baker :-D
Yesterday was the day - I made my first dough from the Artisan Bread book. Here's how it went down . . .
I washed all the bits of the new KitchenAid, and then set about halving the Master Recipe from the book. There was math involved. Well, not really math - more arithmetic, which I was was always pretty good at. Fractions! Yay me!
I put it all in the mixer (which you saw yesterday)
and in about two minutes max, I had this:
I took another photo of it at quarter of 10:
and then went on about my morning for a couple of hours. I came back around quarter of noon and it looked like this:
Wup!! Wup!! The yeast was working!! I left it out a little longer and then put it in the fridge.
This morning, I cut a small piece off and followed the directions (BTW: whole wheat flour and Quaker Oats work just fine if you haven't got corn meal to keep it from sticking to the pizza peel :-) ).
I let it sit for the requisite 40 minutes, put it in the oven, and got this:
Yay Me!!!! It's not perfect - well, the crust is pretty perfect, but the inside was a little gummy. I'm reasonably sure this is because I made a very small loaf. Since this is the size (or even smaller) that I will be making (no way do I ever need an entire loaf of bread in my home), I will be working on the timing in the coming loaves. I put this one in at the 425 temp directed, but since it was so much smaller than an average loaf, I baked it for only 24 minutes instead of 30, which yielded a pretty good crust, but a slightly gummy interior.
Next time, I'm going to go with 420 for the full 30 minutes and see how it goes.
Oh, and BTW, the slightly gummy interier did not detract in any way from the deliciousness of this bread, nearly cool with butter on it (all WW points counted and well worth it :-D).
I washed all the bits of the new KitchenAid, and then set about halving the Master Recipe from the book. There was math involved. Well, not really math - more arithmetic, which I was was always pretty good at. Fractions! Yay me!
I put it all in the mixer (which you saw yesterday)
and in about two minutes max, I had this:
I took another photo of it at quarter of 10:
and then went on about my morning for a couple of hours. I came back around quarter of noon and it looked like this:
Wup!! Wup!! The yeast was working!! I left it out a little longer and then put it in the fridge.
This morning, I cut a small piece off and followed the directions (BTW: whole wheat flour and Quaker Oats work just fine if you haven't got corn meal to keep it from sticking to the pizza peel :-) ).
I let it sit for the requisite 40 minutes, put it in the oven, and got this:
Yay Me!!!! It's not perfect - well, the crust is pretty perfect, but the inside was a little gummy. I'm reasonably sure this is because I made a very small loaf. Since this is the size (or even smaller) that I will be making (no way do I ever need an entire loaf of bread in my home), I will be working on the timing in the coming loaves. I put this one in at the 425 temp directed, but since it was so much smaller than an average loaf, I baked it for only 24 minutes instead of 30, which yielded a pretty good crust, but a slightly gummy interior.
Next time, I'm going to go with 420 for the full 30 minutes and see how it goes.
Oh, and BTW, the slightly gummy interier did not detract in any way from the deliciousness of this bread, nearly cool with butter on it (all WW points counted and well worth it :-D).
Comments
I have to wait until the braces are off before making crusty bread at home, but this looks really good!