The first recipe from Baking With Julia is White Loaves, a yeasted bread. I've made plenty of bread, but to be honest, I'm pretty lazy about it these days. When I make bread, I tend to throw the ingredients in the bread machine, then dump the dough in a pan after the first rise, then let it rise again, then bake it off in the oven. Not someone to totally relinquish the lazy, I allowed my trusty nearly 21-year-old 5-qt. KitchenAid to mix and knead the dough. Based on the heat it generated, the KA has not had a workout like that in a while. Since I didn't have regular active dry yeast, I substituted rapid-rise bread machine yeast. I also used a blend of all-purpose and bread flours. Otherwise, I followed the recipe pretty much as directed.
For the first rise, I ended up with a nice blob of dough:
After the first rise, I shaped the dough. Shaping dough is something I've gotten -- surprise! -- really lazy about, so it was a good exercise to pay attention to what I was doing. I got a couple of nicely shaped loaves in the pans:
Because it was a little cool Saturday when I made the bread, I needed to let the dough rise a bit longer than the recommended 45 minutes. Although the recipe didn't offer this bit of direction, I slashed the top of each loaf so that the loaves wouldn't burst open as they rose in the oven.
Apparently, taking a moment to shape loaves properly is a good thing. These two loaves are about the nicest looking ones I've made in ages.
For an upcoming cupcake recipe, I made some blueberry jam today. Actually, I made a double batch, figuring that it would taste pretty good on a toasted slice of fresh bread.
6 comments:
wow! That amazing bread with homemade marmalade must be amazing!!!
Your loaves are lovely!
Something I seem to have taken it upon myself to write in the comments of at least 25 blogs today: so many of us had issues with our stand mixers (I've read a few blogs where the mixers actually jumped off the counter). While perusing the KA recipe manual booklet (the night of the morning I made my bread, naturally) I found that it says that when making a yeast dough, never turn your speed above setting 2. I didn't know this when I made my bread but once I read it I realized I had repeatedly reduced my speed to 2 to calm the violent rocking and awful smell emanating from my KA. Now we all know for next time. :)
I liked how these turned out also. I do like the sound of that blueberry jam!
I am sure these were heavenly with fresh blueberry jam! Yum.
The slashes on the loaves really dress them up. Will have to remember that next time. My attempt at marmalade this fall was a complete disaster, bet yours was amazing.
Post a Comment