Baking Bread

homemade toast

I enjoy making bread. It's a nice project for a cold day, and it's not really as complicated as all that when you have a good recipe. I tend to go for over complicated stuff, but this weekend I kept it simple. I chose a recipe has just four ingredients, yeast, water, salt and flour. It makes fantastically dense and yeasty bread.

collecting the stuff

I'm not going to actually give you the recipe, unless you ask. If you're in to it, you should get a book about baking. I have the book of bread, which is pretty good, but whatever.

I will show a lot of pictures though. Here we see the yeast going creamy.

yeast

yeast

yeast

Salt and a bunch of flour go in.

flour

flour

dough

It gets mixed up, and stuck on the counter.

dough

work surface

needing kneeding

Kneeding takes about ten minutes later. I don't have a machine or anything. Just good, old fashioned hands. Once it's nice and elastic, and all the gluten is activated, it rises for a couple hours. The stovetop has a warming pad, which sped up the rise.

mr dough, you're kneeded

he is risen

he is beaten down

After splitting the dough in half and putting it in pans, it rises another hour. Then, finally, actual baking.

he was panned

he rose again

baking

Then cooling. Then slicing. Then eating.

baked

cooling

sliced

Eating eating eating. Yum yum yum. This bread is fantastic with butter. It makes a pretty good sandwich too. I could see myself eating this stuff as my primary bread. I'll be making it again.

bread and butter

Rakka got this cheese making book. I thought she was taking this whole self-sufficiency lark a bit far, but I picked it up and flipped through it. And of course, I'm the first one to attempt one of the recipes. Butter!

it's butter, which I made

It turns out that making butter is astoundingly easy. You don't need an official churn or anything, just an old pickle jar or something. Make sure to wash it out pretty thoroughly though. Learned that the hard way.

Anyway, put your room temperature heavy cream (has to be heavy milk, learned that one the hard way too) in the jar, put the lid on tight and shake for 5-10 minutes. That's pretty much it. You've just got to pour off the buttermilk, push the rest out with the back of a spoon, and rinse it a bit. You can mix in some salt.

It's the best butter ever.

And the best thing to put it on is homemade bread.

sourdough came out pretty good this time

This is a recipe from the book of bread. Or, two, really. I made the sourdough starter a couple weeks ago. Attempted the bread last weekend, and it sort of worked. It worked better this time, but still not great.

I have a long way to go before I really understand bread. I always end up using nearly twice as much flour as the recipe calls for. The sourdough in particular always sticks to every freaking thing. The work surface, my hands, the bowl, the pan. Everything.

Maybe it's like driving a stick shift. Keep grinding the gears long enough and one day you just get it.

update: changed "whole milk" to "heavy cream". Whole was the stuff I tried the first time, and it didn't work at all.

Samudra Coffee and Yoga

Samudra Coffee and Yoga is literally right over my back fence. They're good neighbors to have, because they make wonderful baked goods and fantastic cold brewed toddy coffee. I haven't tried the yoga yet.

toddy coffee

Toddy coffee is the hot [don't you mean cold? -Ed] new thing. I can see why. When they mix a bit with ice and water it has a very subtle, almost tea like, flavor, with no bitterness. I can't get enough.

The baked goods are awesome too. I really liked my cranberry-orange scone. I tried Rakka's berry bar; the flavor was intense. Everything is baked on site, so it's super fresh.

Scone and Berry Bar

The blondie was as good as it looks.

Blondie

Samudra is in a location that has a rep for short lived businesses, but I want it to last. So please, I beg you, go there, try one of everything.

[where: 1222 McKenzie Avenue, Bremerton, WA 98337]