Pages

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Making Bread

A few years ago I took up  bread making as a bit of a hobby.  I didn't use a machine, I did it all by hand.  Mixing together the ingredients, kneading the dough and watching it rise are all very satisfying and the aroma of the bread baking touches a spot deep in the soul. 

Most importantly, you can control what goes into your bread.  I look at the label of the whole wheat bread I usually buy and it contains such things as calcium propionate, acetylated tartaric acid esters of mono and diglycerides, ammonium chlorate.  Plus, store-bought bread contains an alarming amount of sodium - in this case 250 mg or 10% of your recommended daily allowance.  When you make your own, you have a much shorter and more pronounceable list of ingredients:  flour, water, yeast and some kind of sugar with a pinch of salt.

Recently, the Bean and I decided to make a loaf of challa which is a braided egg bread.  It turned out okay, considering I left out an ingredient and baked it at too low a temperature.  And it was a wonderful thing to do with the Bean.



Whisking Together Ingredients








Letting the Sponge Do its Thing



Letting the Loaves Rise






The Finished Product

1 comment:

  1. That is such a fun project. I've never baked real bread before. I've done banana bread and such, which is more like muffins, which are really more like cake. I've never made anything that requires yeast and rising. Not yet, anyway. But it's on my list.

    ReplyDelete