Lately have been extremely underwhelmed by the bread I've been making. Too crumbly, too yeasty, and just not quite what I want it to be. So have been searching for a new recipe to try out, and today in the Le Cordon Bleu Complete Cooking Techniques recipe book I found the following recipe for a basic white loaf...
15g Fresh yeast (or 1tbsp active dry yeast)
500ml (or 2 cups) warm water
960g (or 6 cups) white bread flour
10g (2 tsp) salt
This gave me enough dough for two 900g loaves or...
The bread is wonderful, dense and chewy, not too yeasty, with a great bready flavour. The recipe differs a lot from the one I usually use, with half the amount of yeast and no sugar. I made the bread by hand (but did the kneading in my mixer which has a dough hook - the mixer took exception to this and kept trying to throw itself off the bench top, meaning I spent a lot of twenty minutes today leaping across the kitchen to steady it, sigh).
So will continue to experiment this one, and see, firstly if I can get it to work in the bread machine and secondly if I have any success adapting it to wholemeal flour (which I can't get so am presently adding some bran, which is less than ideal).
To go with the bread I made a batch of blackberry and apple jam.
4 people love me:
Why not make the bread in the bread making machine, take it out when it finishes the kneading cycle and bake it in the oven. I have had some success with this method, adding flax seed and soy grits when mixing, it was yummy. Don't know if soy grits are still available though.
I tried kneading in the Kenwood but, unlike yours, it tried to throw the bread mix out of the bowl. A good book on bread making is Richard Bertinet's book, Crust. I have seen it occasionally on ebay. He also has another bread book called Dough.
While writing up my last comment I had a writer's block moment. LOL. The seed that I used to add to my bread was linseed not flax.
I've found that when I use larger quantities (over 750g) of flour in my Kenwood mixer it tends to labour a lot, when I read the instruction book I realised that I had been using too much flour for the machine to cope with. Now I mainly hand knead as I find it quite relaxing. This site has http://www.wildyeastblog.com/ a lot of information about bread making, you might find it useful.
take care
Hi Cait,
Gee all from scratch. I'm not that commited. lol. A bread machine, tip ingredients in and wella, a lovely loaf of bread. :)
Suz :)
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