Ron and I both like to bake bread, but in different ways. After binge-watching several seasons of The Great British Baking Show (name changed from Bake-Off here in North America) I was eager to try Mary Berry's and Paul Hollywood's recipes. No more store-bought English muffins for us, and I make a mean couronne, if I do say so myself.
Ron prefers a less labour-intensive approach. He loves to make basic white bread and Maritime brown bread in our breadmaker. Only five minutes of effort for a delicious homemade loaf. He always bakes a loaf for our grandchildren when they come to visit; in fact, that's usually all they will eat at dinner.
Our last breadmaker served Ron well for several years, then the baking pan developed a leak. We gave it away and bought a new, inexpensive one. The first batch of brown bread was okay, although the crust wasn't as dark as we would like. I decided to try it out with a sweet bread recipe, to see if I could duplicate our favourite supermarket bread - cranberry and hazelnut. I found a recipe that was close, loaded up the breadmaker, and waited.
The result was less than spectacular. The dough scarcely rose, the outside was pale even though I had set the crust setting to Dark, and the interior tasted raw. The Sweet setting on the breadmaker had 35 minutes less rising time than the Basic setting, which accounted for the heavy loaf, but why had the bread not been cooked through? When I sliced it, it had a marbled look, as if it had not been kneaded thoroughly.
Exit breadmaker number two. We found a more expensive one with great ratings, ordered it, and when it arrived (the next day thanks to Amazon Prime) Ron baked a white loaf. It was baked perfectly and was delicious! I made a loaf of peanut butter bread and made us toasted peanut butter, banana and honey sandwiches for lunch.Yummy!
Scroll down for some fun kitchen mishaps, happily not my own.
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9 comments:
There are two kinds of bread makers:
1) Zojirushi
99) everything else ;-)
Seriously, if a gentle reader is thinking of acquiring a bread maker to use the investment in a Zojirushi is well worth it. I had my first one for 11 years and ran innumerable loaves of sandwich bread and loads of dough in it before I finally burned out the motor (maybe a bit of an overload on those dough loads - nah). They also sell replacement paddles and buckets so you don't have to replace the whole machine when those get scratched.
I'm really impress. I've never baked bread at all. The kitchen is not my room. I understood the pictures more than I understood the bread making.
Peanut Butter bread??? Really???? a bread machine recipe??? You wouldn't post the recipe would you?? we LOVE peanut butter around here (even without the chocolate - grinning)
and the kitchen accident pics?? I hate to admit a couple of them could have been taken in my kitchen over the years...........
In college, I baked homemade bread (honey wheat) by hand. I loved it! But it did take all day & entailed a lot of clean-up. I've never used a bread machine. This post made me want to buy one, even though I have a love/hate relationship with bread. I love it, and I hate how much weight I gain when eating it regularly!
Hi Hermione, I'm impressed too, I admit I haven't tried baking bread. My efforts would probably look more like the pics lol. Some yummy interesting flavours, love the peanut loaf. I had no idea all bread makers aren't equal.
Hugs
Roz
Kitchen disasters pictures made me smile, thanks.
I'm not very adventurous with our bread maker but I like the sound of some of the bread you and Ron have made except the peanut butter:)
Love,
Ronnie
xx
Those pictures! LOL. I wanted a break maker for the longest time. I never got round to it, and then I was told to cut out the carbs and sugars, and I gave up bread-eating. So that was the end of THAT plan.
Your peanut butter loaf sounds delicious!
We have attempted to bake bread from scratch and it typically turns out ok. We buy our wheat and grains from a small miller company in mid-state Illinois which uses organic only from its own fields. but we recently altered our diet and have extracted carbohydrate and sugar from it and we are both dropping weight and blood pressure a lot and we are doing intermittent fasting. Eventually when we get to our goal weights, we will get back to bread baking. Once we did have a bread machine and it did ok, but not spectacular. Off to Goodwill it went.
Baxter
The pix are hilarious.
We watch the Great British Bake Off all the time. Some seasons the Misses can even quote the lines. We love making the pastries from the show. What help greatly is the having all the fancy tools they use. The Artisan Stand Mixer is the best thing we ever bought for the kitchen. Makes the bread dough perfect.
Wendel
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