July 14th, 2010
One of my nicknames is “The Dessert Queen” since for years I’ve enjoyed baking fun, even complicated desserts. But I never really got into bread making much. Other than the occasional batch of cornbread or biscuits, I very rarely ever made by own bread.
For close to two months now I’ve had the pleasure of making my own bread each week. Not every loaf turned out. I made some mistakes, but I’ve also had many successes and found recipes that work for me. There are a lot of advantages of making bread for yourself:
- You don’t have to look sideways at the bread in the store and wonder when it was really baked.
- You won’t have to deal with a pesky plastic bag or other packaging.
- You control the ingredients: organic flour, honey or sugar — no problem.
- You can give fresh-baked bread gifts!
- You can try great recipes like Organic Honey Oat Bread (My batch pictured above! Recipe from Jennifer.)
The only downside of making your bread, as I see it, is that you need to allow time for rising. If this is difficult for you during the week, make a couple of loaves during the weekend and store one in the refrigerator.
If you hate the kneading process, invest in a good stand mixer! I’m probably more lazy than I’d care to admit. One very probable reason I’ve recently started making more of my own bread is that I received a stand mixer as a gift. Making bread is much easier with a dough hook…
Another reason I started making my own bread was that a friend of mine, Jennifer at Growing a Green Family, started talking about how she wanted to get back to making more of her food from scratch to cut down on packaging. From scratch always taste better (don’t let the commercials for processed food fool you).
If you start making more food from scratch, you’ll notice something interesting happening: In the grocery store, you won’t shop the interior aisles as much. That’s where most of the canned and processed stuff lives. You may also end up with fewer items in your cart and a cheaper bill at checkout, not to mention more compliments from family and guests.
Do you have a favorite bread recipe?
(Image by Peggy Rowland)
Filed under Home + Living | Comments (3)
You did it! It looks pretty darn good. How did it taste?
It was good, especially while still hot! I don’t normally like wheat bread, but this bread had plenty of other flavors in it. It wasn’t difficult to adapt it to the stand mixer. I just put the wet ingredients in the center of the dry ones and turned on. Michael really likes it too. It tastes great with peanut butter. Have you tried that?
Dave made organic pb&js with it and loved it. I stuck to toast, plain and maybe a turkey sandwich (I think?) Oh, I made Cedar a pb&j with this and he says, “It’s not wheaty enough!” Sometimes I think I’ve created a little healthy eating monster – he’s always calling me out now 🙁
Still, I guess I could have actual problems 😉