Cake and Bread

If you regularly purchase several loaves of bread each week to your family, in addition to rolls, frozen pizzas and other bread products, the cost can quickly add up.  However, if you learn to make your own bread, you can take a huge chunk out of your grocery bills – especially if you often purchase expensive “whole grain” products.  Chances are, you’ll be amazed at how many different foods you can make with a single bread recipe.

Uses for Bread Recipes

If you love the taste of pizza, rolls, pitas, and bread, you might be surprised to know that you can make all of them with the same basic dough.  For example, if you find a bread recipe that’s easy for you to work with, you can toss it into a pizza shell, in addition to shaping the dough into loaves.  Or you may want to shape some of the bread into rolls, and then sprinkle them with sesame seeds before baking them.  There are many ways to shape bread dough into different food bases, and at the same time, you’ll be saving an enormous amount of money on each item.

Budgeting Advantages

If you buy bread in the store, it’s likely to cost you over $2.00 per loaf, while frozen pizzas may cost three to five times as much.  On the other hand, one five-pound bag of flour is more than enough to make two loaves of bread, plus three large pizzas, for only a few dollars a bag.  All you’ll need to do from there is add your toppings.  In many cases, you’ll find that whatever products you bake at home wind up being at least 50% cheaper than their pre-made, store-bought counterparts.

Finding Bread Recipes

If you have a basic cookbook at home, you may already have access to a good bread dough recipe, or you can find some excellent bread recipes online.  As you browse the online listings, authors will detail whether you’re working with a soft dough or a stiffer one.  You’ll also be able to read reviews left by other people that have tried these recipes.  In some cases, you may even find suggestions for recipe changes, as well as tasty additions.

Baking Bread on a Schedule

Of course, few people have the time to bake bread on a daily basis, since the process may take a few hours.  That said, if you can carve out a single five hour block of time in your weekly schedule, you should be able to bake enough bread, pizza and desserts for the rest of the week.  If you enjoy cooking, you may even find that the soothing process of baking bread becomes the part of the week that you enjoy most.

Every time you buy bread – or any other food that is based on bread dough – it’s as if you’re throwing away half the money in your food budget.  In many cases, if you can dedicate just a few hours a week to baking, you’ll have delicious, healthy bread products for your family to eat, since when you do your own cooking, you won’t be adding the preservatives or other harmful additives that commercial breads often contain.  At the same time, you’ll save money over grocery store alternatives, allowing you to stretch your food budget even further.

Though the health benefits of whole grains are well known, plenty of people still can’t get over the taste.

Accustomed to the puffy softness of white breads, some people balk at the strong flavor and chewy texture that comes with whole grains, especially in whole-grain breads. There are easy ways around this.

First, try baking whole-grain bread at home, where you have more control over the consistency of the final product. Second, try a transitional recipe, one that blends whole-wheat and white flours.

Johnson & Wales University baking instructor Peter Reinhart has developed an innovative technique that makes it relatively simple to produce whole-grain breads with rich flavors and pleasant textures.

Reinhart uses a two-day method and creates two “pre-doughs” that separate the functions of flavor development and leavening. On the second day the two doughs are combined into a final dough, which then is formed into loaves and baked.

This technique gives you more flexibility. Traditional bread must rise several times, then be baked without delay. With Reinhart’s method, you can create the two pre-doughs, called the soaker and the starter, in little time, then hold them in the refrigerator for up to three days before combining them into a final dough for baking.

This recipe for Transitional Cinnamon Raisin Bread from Reinhart’s book, “Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads,” looks daunting but requires less than an hour of hands-on time.

The resulting bread is moist with a crisp crust and pleasant texture. Whole-grain skeptics and lovers will appreciate the comforting cinnamon flavor and the personal touch that goes into home baking.

Transitional Cinnamon

Raison Bread

For the soaker:

21/4 cups whole-wheat flour

5/8 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk, buttermilk, yogurt, soy milk or rice milk

11/3 cups raisins (optional)

For the starter:

21/4 cups unbleached bread flour

1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

3/4 cup milk, buttermilk, yogurt, soy milk or rice milk, at room temperature

1 large egg, slightly beaten

For the final dough:

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

5/8 teaspoon salt

21/4 teaspoons instant yeast

1 tablespoon honey

1/4 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 cup cinnamon sugar (3 tablespoons sugar mixed with 2 teaspoons cinnamon)

To make the soaker:

In a large bowl, combine flour, salt and milk. Mix for 1 minute, or until all the flour is hydrated and the ingredients form a ball of dough. If using the raisins, knead them into the dough.

Cover bowl loosely with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours. If it will be more than 24 hours, refrigerate for up to 3 days. Remove it 2 hours before mixing.

To make the starter:

In a second large bowl, mix bread flour, yeast, milk and egg until they form a ball of dough. Knead the dough for 2 minutes in the bowl. The dough should feel very tacky.

Knead it for another minute. Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 8 hours and up to 3 days.

About 2 hours before mixing the final dough, remove the starter from the refrigerator.

To make the final dough:

On a lightly floured counter, use a metal pastry scraper to chop soaker and starter into 12 smaller pieces each. Sprinkle pieces with flour to keep them from sticking together.

In the mixer bowl of a stand mixer, combine the dough pieces with flour, salt, yeast, honey, butter and cinnamon. Mix with the paddle attachment (preferable) or dough hook on slow for 1 minute to bring the ingredients together into a ball. Switch to dough hook and mix on medium-low, occasionally scraping down the bowl, until everything is well-combined, 2 to 3 minutes. Add more flour or water as needed until the dough is soft and slightly sticky.

Dust a work surface with flour, then roll dough in the flour to coat. Knead by hand, incorporating only as much extra flour as needed, until the dough feels soft and tacky, but not sticky, 3 to 4 minutes. Form into a ball and let it rest on the work surface for 5 minutes while you prepare a clean, lightly oiled bowl.

Resume kneading dough to strengthen the gluten and make any final water or flour adjustments, about 1 minute. The dough should have strength, yet feel soft and supple, and very tacky. Form the dough into a ball. Place in prepared bowl, rolling to coat with oil. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let dough rise at room temperature until it is about 11/2 times its original size, about 45 to 60 minutes.

When dough has risen, lightly coat 2 standard loaf pans with cooking spray.

Dust work surface with 1 tablespoon flour and gently transfer dough to work surface with a plastic bowl scraper (try not to rip or tear the dough).

Divide dough in half, then roll each piece into an 8-inch square about 1/2-inch thick. Sprinkle each square with some of the cinnamon sugar. Tightly roll up each square. Place loaves into pans.

Mist tops of loaves with cooking spray, then cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until the loaves crest above the pans, about 1 hour.

Meanwhile, heat oven to 400 degrees. Place pans on middle rack of oven, lower temperature to 325 degrees, and bake for 20 minutes. Rotate pan 180 degrees and continue baking, until the loaves are a rich brown on all sides, sound hollow when thumped on the bottom, and register at least 195 degrees at the center, another 25 to 40 minutes.

Transfer loaves to a cooling rack and allow to cool for at least 1 hour before serving. Makes 2 loaves.

In the bread bowl, they’re sticky. They take a long time to knead, and they don’t rise quite so high. Why then bother making your own bread?

Answer: Rye-bread lovers do it for the tangy flavor, chewy texture and those tasty caraway seeds. They do it because baking one’s own bread is satisfying. Just as gardening does, bread-baking connects us to the food we eat.

I’ve been baking bread at least once a week for 36 years, but I’m a late convert to making rye bread, which I loved to eat even as a child. My mother wasn’t a baker. She bought the bread at the local bakery.

I learned about souring bread from “The Tassajara Bread Book,” a standard text among us back-to-the-landers in the 1970s. Tassajara No. 1 taught the sponge method of baking, which called for making up a sponge with all the liquid but only half the flour, letting that rise overnight and completing the process in the morning.

There are rye bread recipes that call for incremental steps over a 48-hour period, but that seems extreme. A 24-hour process will make a good sour rye loaf.

Because rye bread doesn’t rise as much as wheat bread, it doesn’t dry out as fast either. That gives rye bread the edge for still-fresh second-day eating.

Don’t seal crusty bread up in a plastic container or plastic wrap until after the second day. You’ll ruin the texture of the crust and you won’t help the interior texture either. The traditional bread bag made of paper works better.

The great rye breads of my youth were a mixture of white rye flour and white wheat flour. White rye flour can be mail-ordered from King Arthur at www.kingarthurflour.com, but the cost is high.

My recipe, making a loaf both darker and denser, uses roughly 60 percent Hodgson Mill wholegrain rye flour and 40 percent unbleached white (wheat) flour.

I’m presuming I’m not the only person baking rye bread in Charleston. Kroger wouldn’t give rye flour shelf space at several local stores if someone wasn’t buying.

For years, I baked all my bread at 350 degrees. That was wrong, wrong, wrong, as the Gazette’s editorial writers used to say. Artisan breads, it turns out, get their great crusts by starting at 425 or 450 degrees, then scaling back to 375.

If you bake bread regularly, buy yeast by the half-pound or one-pound package. If you use the sponge method, it takes only the tiniest bit of yeast to get the process started. Give yeast moisture, flour and time, and it multiplies quickly.

Source: http://sundaygazettemail.com/Food/200809230809

Jerry Dennis of Fayetteville, N.C., has been searching for a recipe for Grape-Nuts Bread, which he says was printed on a box of Post Grape-Nuts in the mid-1940s.

Mary Ann Ford of Cockeysville, Md., sent in a recipe given to her by her mother-in-law when she was married in 1967. Her mother-in-law told her that it came from a box of Grape-Nuts cereal in the 1940s. Ford says it is still a family favorite.

The only change I made to the original recipe was to substitute buttermilk for sour milk. This bread is wholesome-tasting but a bit plain. I suggest serving it with cream cheese or jam.

If I were to make it again, I would add 1 teaspoon or so of orange or lemon zest and maybe some nuts or raisins.

Grape-Nuts Bread

½cup Grape-Nuts cereal
1 cup sour milk
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon shortening
1 egg, slightly beaten

Dash of salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups flour

**

Mix first 6 ingredients together. Sift together the last 3 ingredients and add to first. Put into a greased loaf pan. Let rise for 20 minutes. Bake 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

Makes 1 loaf; serves 8 to 10.

Per serving (based on 10 servings): 213 calories, 4 grams protein, 2 grams fat, 1 gram saturated fat, 44 grams carbohydrate, 1 gram fiber, 23 milligrams cholesterol, 246 milligrams sodium.

BY JULIE ROTHMAN

Source: http://www.kansas.com/living/food/story/538663.html