With a new year, many people are focused on new resolutions, or the revival of old resolutions that were cast to the wayside at some point in the last year or years. This month’s Canadian Food Experience Challenge focuses on resolutions, and when it comes to food resolutions, the one I’ve made (and broken) the most often over the past couple years is to make my own bread.
The Canadian Food Experience Challenge began June 7, 2013, and as we (participants) share our collective stories through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity. Whenever I make homemade bread I feel tied to my immigrant settler roots, where there was no other way to have bread than to make it, and where people with far less leisure time than me had bread making as part of their regular routine. Living in a country where gorgeous golden wheat fields abound, I wish good bread was a staple part of everyone’s diet, as unpopular as that is quickly becoming. I love everything about fresh homemade bread, from crusty sourdough to soft rosemary foccacia to regular sandwich bread to sweet banana bread.
This year, I’m determined to make my own bread at least 80% of the time, and I believe it’s possible because I started executing this goal a couple months ago, in the middle of a busy school semester, and no such busyness lies in my foreseeable future, so there is NO excuse this time.
Easy Homemade White Bread
I just simply stopped buying bread. When you decide good bread is too expensive, and the ingredient list is too long, and you think about how fantastic fresh homemade bread looks, smells, and tastes, it’s not that hard. Making bread takes very little hands-on time, and now that I’m home full time I know I have more than enough time.
The hardest part about the commitment was finding THE bread recipe, the one I could make all the time, that would work every time, that made every minute of work worth it. I have a quick rise bread I make regularly because I am a creature of poor planning, but I wanted a regular go-t0 homemade sandwich bread that worked every time. I had plenty of flat, lopsided, and dense loaves in the course of this experimentation.
I know that consistency in yeast baking is all about things that are totally my own fault, like adequate but not excessive rising time, water of the right temperature to get friendly with the yeast but not kill it, and sugar added before salt and fat so the yeast doesn’t feel inhibited, but I want a bread recipe that works for me and my approach to baking. When I see “spoon and level flour” written like it’s some kind of rule, I laugh. I’ve never spooned or leveled flour in my life. I scoop it straight out of the bag with my measuring scoop, shake it a little, and dump it in. I’m doin’ just fine.
Canadian Settler Sourdough
After several failed or mediocre attempts, I eventually did what I should have done first: asked some trusted friends. Two friends recommended the same recipe, so I knew it had to be good, and it was: THIS is now the bread recipe I use every time for our regular, everyday bread, and it is
. It rises SO nice and high, the texture is perfect even when it’s toasted from the freezer, the water temperature isn’t too picky, and I can substitute more than half of the all purpose flour with whole wheat bread flour without it being any less perfect!
The Molasses & Oat Bread I’m sharing today is another bread I have found to be very forgiving of my imperfect approach to bread (and yes, life), and it’s a great option to have in the bread rotation. It’s healthy, full of flavour, a lovely rich colour from the molasses, and perfect with things like cheese, egg salad, and jam. It also happens to rise beautifully, and toast as well as any store bought bread.
Canadian Lemon Bread Recipe
One thing I’ve learned in bread making so far is the importance of not adding too much flour. Just as overmixing your muffin batter will give you tough muffins, so adding too much flour will give you tough, dry bread. This is where a stand mixer is great because you can leave it stickier and just scrape it out into your rising bowl with a spoon when the kneading is done. If you’re doing it by hand, a great trick is to knead in a large bowl lightly coated with cooking spray and flour. Dough sticking to a bowl is much less problematic than dough sticking to your counter and you’re less likely to add too much flour.
Between this molasses oat bread, my quick rise bread, and my new go-to sandwich bread, I feel like this resolution is doable. It’s even more doable since we aren’t actually huge bread eaters – we usually have a stash of muffins, scones, pancakes, or waffles kicking around in the freezer. However, good bread is still a necessity in our house for under fried eggs, made into grilled cheese or grilled chocolate strawberry sandwiches, or turned into French toast. I hope my parents don’t mind homemade bread because I plan to be using their oven often while I’m there :)
The next step in the resolution is the rest of the bread products. I’ve done homemade bagels and LOVED them, but somehow never got around to doing it again. Same thing for homemade soft pretzels. Then there are amazing recipes for English muffins, and those and homemade tortillas have been on my kitchen bucket list for aaages.
Best Canadian Bread Machine Recipes
Which bread product does your family consume the most of, and which are you most (or least!) likely to make at home?
Try to wait for it to cool before slicing it - cutting only part of a warm loaf often makes the rest cool unevenly, affecting the texture and making it more gummy.The Best Homemade White Bread. Bread baking is on the rise because nothing says home baked comfort food goodness like a perfectly baked crusty loaf of homemade bread, fresh from the oven. This recipe is well over 40 years old and turns out perfectly every time.
When I think of Newfoundland baking, the first thing that comes to mind is homemade bread rising high above large bread pans in 2 or 3 bun loaves. As a child of the 60’s and 70’s in Newfoundland, it was still the rule rather than the exception to find homemade bread in many homes.
Sweet Bread Recipe
With freezers in most homes by that point, though, daily bread baking was no longer necessary.Still manybaked at least once or twice a week.
Debates within the family were common on the topic of who made the best bread. A good deal of pride was taken in the ability to turn out a good batch.
Some senior ladies with large families of 10 or more children have told me numerous stories over the years. Stories of baking large batches of 8, 10, 12 or more loaves every day. Plus
Canada's Best Bread Machine Baking Recipes: Washburn, Donna, Butt, Heather: 9780778800033: Books
It was hard work back then keeping all of those kids fed. I don’t think most would be up to the task these days.
The loaves seemed much larger in those days and not just because I was much smaller! I’ve seen some pretty big bread pans used in my time.
I remember it was necessary to trim the side off a slice of Nan Morgan’s bread just to get it in her drop down side toaster. That’s the old fashioned kind that only toasted on one side and you had to turn the slice over to toast the other side.
Canadian Rye Bread For Bread Machine Recipe By Robbieeq
Coming from a large family myself, the second side was almost never toasted. That’s because it would have taken too long to make toast for all of our tribe.
One of the things we all enjoyed back when I was growing up was thick slices of fresh bread topped with jam and Fussels canned cream. Now that I think of it, that was very much like what the British do with scones .
I still adore it to this day. Most recently I had it with our Partridgeberry Apple Jam . It definitely brought me strait back to childhood.
Best Canadian Bread Machine Baking Recipes · Books · 49th Shelf
It is now much more of a rarity to find families who bake bread on a regular basis. However, I have tried to keep that tradition as part of my own family life.
I have been baking bread with my own children since they have been able to stand on chairs at the table and knead their own little balls of dough.
They still love making it and my son in particular cannot go more than a few days without his fix of homemade bread. Although we try to encourage more whole grain varieties these days. Still, he’d take plain homemade white bread over any other kind.
Thera's Canadian Fried Dough Recipe
These days we make much smaller batches in much smaller bread pans, usually no more than a couple of loaves at a time. Often, I now prefer to use
0 Komentar