Cooking In Boone ... Staunton: First “regular” bread from the new mixer…

Since I managed to make Pear Bread without burning down the house or sending the new mixer through the wall… I figured I’d try some “regular” bread… But, I had already made some Egg Bread in the breadmaker to go with Jack’s Mustard (Jack being Virginia’s Dad) .. so today’s bread project would go with the meatballs and sausage that I made the other night… so.. I’d be making sub rolls! For the record… this might be the easiest bread you could ever make… but, I wanted to start off simple…

First, you’ve got to get the yeast going… 1 package of yeast, 1 cup of bread flour, and 1 TSP Sugar go into the mixer bowl with 1-1/4 Cups of 105 degree hot water…this is going to sit and get happy for about 10 minutes or so..

This is going to get the Yeast going… I use regular dry active yeast… not the quick rising stuff..

While the yeast is getting happy, you can toss the rest of the dry ingredients together…

This is another 2 cups of flour, 1 TSP Salt, and another TSP of Sugar.

After 10 minutes has passed, get the dough hook on the mixer and get it spinning slowly while you add the rest of the dry ingredients about 1/2 cup at a time…

Once the flour is starting to get equally all mixed up… add 1 TBSP of oil…

Now, your dough should be coming together… in the mixer, on #2 Speed setting, it took about 2-3 minutes to go from flour to dough… so. that’s pretty awesome… the mixer will also “knead” the bread … although in my machine, since this was a smaller amount of dough, you can see that it kind of sank to the bottom and the hook danced around over the top of it… no big deal.. I just pulled it out, balled it up, and tossed it back in…but next time, I’ll likely double the recipe. I let the machine knead it for probably another 2-3 minutes…

When the dough is ready, toss it into an oiled bowl and cover with a wet towel or a piece of plastic… then, let it rise for about an hour to an hour and a half depending on the temperature… I let mine do the first rise in the oven, where it’s warm and doesn’t have any drafts.

After the dough has doubled in size, punch it down and form it into loaves, rolls, put it into loaf pans… whatever your poison. Since I was making sub rolls, I broke the dough up into 4 *equal* (Yeah Right) portions . I put mine on my double-bottomed baking sheet with a bit of my floured baking spray.

Take the sharpest knife you have and make a 1/4” deep slit down the length of each loaf. This will allow the bread to “vent” a little bit while cooking.

Now’s a good time to get the oven up to 425 … when you start pre-heating the oven, put a pan of water on the bottom rack to get some moisture in the oven as it preheats and cooks.

While the oven is preheating, let the bread rise again.. (not in the oven this time, find another warm place for it to hang out) .. it should take about 40 minutes, and the loaves will probably change more in width this time than height as you can see above.

Once they’ve risen again, and the oven is preheated, toss them in the oven for 25-35 minutes.. when you put them in the oven, change the temperature from 425 to 400 … depending on the size / shape / thickness of loaves, your cooking time will vary. The the 4 loaves I made took right around 30 minutes.

You can see what the double-bottomed baking sheet does in the last picture… it keeps the bottom of the bread from getting too overly crispy…

For the first batch, I think this came out pretty dang good. I used a little too much oil in the bowl, but that’s not a game-ending mistake. Also, we never seem to have any dang Saran wrap… and a towel, whether wet or not sticks to bread; even when said bread is oil covered. So.. I need to get some Saran wrap.

Now.. for the whole reason why this bread was made…