Most of us live with some significant gaps between the sort of person we imagine ourselves to be and the things we feel we ought to be doing, and the things we actually do. For some this means living with the dream of being a footballer, or a pop star, or even just being a celebrity, famous for being famous, while continuing with the day job as an accountant. For me it means imagining I am the sort of person who bakes their own bread. I feel it goes with the beekeeping and gardening and general enthusiasm for baking. I have the sort of short, strong, broad hands that were clearly made for kneading. I have an Aga. I like home made bread. I like the idea of knowing what is in the loaf I eat and that it contains flour, yeast, salt, and water. No enzymes, flour treatment agents, bleach, reducing agent, emulsifier, or preservatives.
There is one snag with this self-image, which is that I am not very good at making bread. I've managed milk rolls over the years that weren't bad, in a slightly yeasty sort of way, and a Moroccan flatbread cooked in a hot frying pan, that was pretty good. I even once, with enormous effort, produced a ciabatta that was quite nice, though not necessarily sufficiently nicer than the ones from Tesco to justify the time spent making it at home. I made a soda bread the other day as a sort of preparatory move towards bread making. But producing a proper wholemeal loaf that looked, felt and tasted like bread, rather than having all the texture and flavour of a brick, has eluded me.
It doesn't help my confidence that the books say that wholemeal bread tends to be denser than white. I prefer wholemeal, for everyday use, but dense is not a good characteristic in the Systems Administrator's eyes when it comes to bread. The SA would like bread to be fluffy. Sliced brown bread from the farm shop or supermarket passes muster, but I don't think you can get brown, or rather wholemeal, to fluff up like that at home. I think you need all the steam and additives the Chorleywood bread process can give you, and maybe a mix of wholemeal and white flour with a dollop of caramel to give that nice brown colour. I have once or twice experimented with the Cranks recipe book Doris Grant no-knead brown loaf, and I think it came out right, or at least like the bread in Cranks, when there used to be a branch round the corner from my office in the early 90s, but it was much too brick-like for the SA's taste. Cranks has now retrenched to one branch, in Totnes where they don't mind eating bricks, as long as they are wholefood.
Since yesterday it was raining I decided after we'd been shopping for the Significant Birthday present that I would make bread. Originally I was thinking of a stollen. I did make a stollen the Christmas before last, and it came out remarkably well, given my lack of expertise with yeast cookery. But then I realised I didn't have any marzipan and hadn't soaked the fruit, and that the bag of wholemeal flour was on the elderly side, as was the tub of instant yeast. The flour smelled all right, so I decided to practice using the most basic ingredients on a bog standard ordinary brown loaf. If it wasn't very nice I could always feed it to the chickens, since they wouldn't be that fussy, and organic wholemeal flour certainly wasn't going to hurt them.
I decided to go with Andrew Whitely on this one. His book is slightly ominously titled bread matters. The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. It was that or Richard Bertinet or Elizabeth David. Bertinet's book is called Dough: Simple Contemporary Bread, and it leans towards oil enriched doughs made into fancy shapes. Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery is simply wonderful, but more discursive than I wanted at that moment, since it starts with the history of grain before moving on to the history of milling, reaching different types of oven by page 155 and finally recipes on page 255. The recipes are hedged around with enough anecdotes and alternative methods to not be entirely confidence inspiring to the nervous cook. I wanted somebody bossy to tell me what to do.
Andrew Whitley includes a fair amount of pre-amble, including detailed descriptions of the ingredients and methods going into modern commercially produced bread that leave you not really wanting to eat it. However, once you get on to the recipes on page 141 he does kick off with something called Basic Bread. I thought that basic bread was what I wanted. If I could get the hang of that I could start adding walnuts or olives or sundried tomatoes, once I was over the brick stage. The recipe for one large or two small loaves told me to use 600g of wholemeal flour and 8g fresh yeast. Now I did not have any fresh yeast, only some Allinson's Dried Active Yeast that was best before the end of July. I vaguely recalled that to convert from fresh to dried yeast you halved the weight in the recipe, which was also what it said on the tin. But the tin said to use 15g of dried yeast or one level tablespoon for 650g flour. 600g and 650g aren't so very different, not nearly as different as 4g versus 15g. I had a nasty feeling the books all cautioned against using too much yeast, as the resulting bread would taste odd, keep badly and otherwise be a sad disappointment, on the other hand I didn't want to be sitting up until two in the morning waiting for the dough to rise if I used too little.
I followed the instructions on the tin. After all, I don't even know if all dried yeast is the same. The books tend to be rather sniffy about dried yeast, encouraging you to go and beg some from a local baker, or buy it in a health food shop. No wonder making your own bread ends up sounding so off-puttingly complicated, if you have to trawl around the local health food shops and negotiate with bakery counter staff before you can even start. The yeast frothed up gratifyingly in the jug of warm water with a teaspoon of sugar, so had not died since July. I mixed it into the flour and salt, transferred the dough to a board once the liquid was absorbed as the book said, and kneaded for ten minutes by the clock, then left it to prove for something over two hours next to the Aga, the bowl covered with a damp tea towel. After a slow start it rose until it was quite a lot bigger. I shaped it into two loaves as the book told me, not because I especially wanted small loaves but because I only had small tins, and left them for a second proving for something over half an hour. They did get larger, though not enough to reach the corners of the tins, and I thought that maybe I was heading for brick territory. The books warn about the dangers of over-proving, which can cause the loaf to collapse, or taste odd, or something, so when they began to feel quite spongy I put them in the bottom of the top oven for ten minutes, then moved them to the top of the bottom for another twenty.
The cooking times in the book were amazingly vague, for a recipe that gave the total weight of ingredients as 1013g and not one kilogramme. The instructions for telling whether your loaf was cooked weren't cut and dried either, warning that even if the bottom sounded hollow when tapped that didn't mean it was cooked all the way through. Basically, if it looked cooked it was, and if you didn't know what cooked bread looked like then that was tough. Keep practising. I thought the loaves looked cooked after half an hour and decided to risk taking them out of the oven, since overcooked bread would be as nasty as undercooked, and if they were doughy in the middle the chickens would eat them anyway.
We didn't need any bread with supper, so I had to wait until breakfast time to cut a slice and see what they were like. They were just like real bread. The crumb was OK all the way through, not soggy in the middle, and it tasted like brown bread, not all weird and yeasty like some of my past efforts. If I'd been given a slice with soup in a gastropub or restaurant that boasted home made bread I'd have thought it was perfectly fine. Very nice, in fact. The Systems Administrator had some for lunch and pronounced it to be good, though with some regret that it wasn't as fluffy as the farm shop sort.
It was pretty straightforward to make, and the washing up didn't take long, just one bowl and the pastry board, plus the tins and cooling rack. I think the main obstacle to making bread regularly is working out when to do it, since after starting it off you have to come back to do more to it in a couple of hours, for which you need clean hands, and then hover around for the next hour while it proves and cooks. If your ideal day at home consists of disappearing into the garden after breakfast and then not reappearing until lunchtime, happy and grubby, then making your own bread would disrupt the morning. If you do it in the evening then unless you get started by six you won't be finished until after you might have liked to go to bed, unless you are by nature an owl rather than a lark. The ideal might be to find a recipe that would work with the second proving overnight, in the fridge. Then the initial kneading and shaping the loaves could be done in the evening, after I'd finished gardening for the day and cleaned my hands. I'd even have fresh bread for breakfast, hot out of the oven, if I weren't in a tearing hurry to get going.
In the meantime they do sell bread in Tesco.
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