To make, to bake, to buy: leavened bread

Various food staples or low-cost foods are time consuming to make and have ready-made versions readily available. I have often wondered, though, whether I should be making them more, both in number and frequency. I have pulled together a few thoughts on this topic in a series of entries. Here’s the first, which deals with my experiences with leavened bread.

Yeast has always been something of a nemesis for me. Some of my handmade loaves of bread have been so dense they could have been used as deadly weapons. I did make a vaguely lightweight loaf of cheese bread once but I seriously think that was a fluke. My attempt at foccacia went OK, but that doesn’t really have to get very tall, which I think was the secret behind my success.

I know the theory, a tad of the science, and how to knead, thanks to home economics lessons at school. I have also received many a hint and tip from successful bread bakers, but in my hands, dough is put to sleep rather than brought to life. I think a major hindrance has been that in the absence of an airing cupboard—the loss of immersion heaters must be becoming more widespread in the age of combination boilers—I haven’t been able to find an alternative spot warm enough to prove the dough well. Balancing the dough container on top of the radiator just doesn’t cut it.

My mother saved the day. After listening to my tales of woe she bought me a bread-making machine. I have many things for which to thank my mother, but this features pretty highly. At last I can create light, tasty bread at home. There’s nothing like a sandwich made on super soft, barely cooled, bread. Plus, with the delay setting, if I remember to put the ingredients in at night, I can wake up to the smell of baking.

Machine-made bread does, however, have a few oddities that amuse me. The loaves often come out of the pan a like a square pannetone, taller than they are long. This trompe l’oeil, especially when the loaf is brown, means I have to keep reminding myself that ham won’t clash with the candied peel. Even more confusing, the flavour is also slightly sweet. I use the recipes provided by the machine manufacturers, which they claim are designed to optimise results in their machines.  An ingredient in quite a lot of the recipes is milk powder. Not only might this impart the distinctive flavour to my machine-made bread, but neither my mother nor I can work out its exact purpose. I’m sure some tweaking the recipes would be possible, but I haven’t tried this yet. In view of my lack of success with bread, though, I’m not really confident enough to know what to change. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully changed them. Finally, the paddle that kneads the dough frequently gets stuck inside the cooked loaf. It’s easy enough to get out once the loaf has cooled, but a funny dent is left in several slices, and if you forget to remove it, hitting it with the bread knife can be a little disturbing!

The machine leaflet also comes with recipes for dough for smaller or shaped breads, such as bread rolls, pizza bases, French bread etc, which it kneads and proves before you remove the dough to shape it. So, this brings me full circle to the proving problem, as a rising stage for this or other dough I make by hand, such as for naan, is required after shaping. I have a double oven, so tried proving bread rolls in the top oven while the bottom oven was on. It helped a bit, but not much. My new solution, tried out yesterday, is to heat the oven to the lowest temperature for a little while, turn it off and leave the dough in there for several hours while it cools. This seemed to work quite well, as I thought my naan dough might get out of control it increased in size so much! I will definitely be trying this out more in the future and will report on my experiences anon.

The only major downside to a bread machine is the size. It takes up quite a lot of work surface if left out, but fitting it in a cupboard might also be tricky. If it does end up in a cupboard there’s the risk of out of sight, out of mind! Owing to various recent house refurbishments, mine is currently balanced on a hamper with a load of junk on top of it. The next bit of work on the house, though, will be a new kitchen, and when we were designing it we ensure there would be plenty of work space to have it available for use at all times, that’s how much I love it! So, I think that for loaves I will never return to the handmade method, but for some things, such as naan—and I’m thinking about trying pitta soon—there might be hope.