Bread Making – with Machine or Without
So something I’ve been doing more and more, lately, is more cooking and baking. I have a page over at RecipeZaar.com. There you can see my recipes and reviews and photos and so on.
So bread making is one of the big things I’ve been trying lately. I’ve actually made yeast bread four times now. And we’ve even eaten the results! I do not have a bread machines
One thing I do find is a lot of recipes that call for a bread machine, and do not give alternate directions for making the recipe by hand. Today on the RecipeZaar forums duonyte gave me some general guidelines for converting any bread machine recipe to a “by hand” recipe. Here they are posted below, for reference. Thanks duonyte!
The bread machine is just a method for mixing – any recipe can be converted to and from. I am not sure whether you really mean make totally by hand or whether you mean to use a stand mixer, so I’ll try to cover both.
First, soften the yeast in a bit of water with a pinch of sugar and a tsp of flour. Mix and put in warm place until it foams up. In the meantime, stir together all the dry ingredients. When the yeast foams up, mix it together with the wet ingredients.
Place about 1/3 of your dry ingredients in the bowl, add half the liquid, and stir hard or mix with mixer. Add another third of the dry and remaining wet, and continue mixing. Change to dough hook if you are using machine, add the remaining dry ingredients. If doing by hand, you will probably turn out and knead in the remaining dry. Knead for 10 minutes of so until the dough is silky in texture.
Place in greased bowl, turn to grease top, cover and let rise. This generally takes an hour or so, but depends on warmth of kitchen, etc. Gently punch down and shape as desired. Let rise again. Bake at 375 deg. for about 40 minutes. Exact time depends in part on the shape. If you have a digital thermometer, check the internal temp. It should be between 195 deg. and 205 deg Farenheit.
Let cool before slicing.
The next yeast recipe I’m planning to try is duonyte’s Oat Potato Sandwich Bread