June 19, 2011 - Amish White Bread

Sometime in the last couple days I kept thinking about what ingredients I had lying around so I could keep cooking and not spend a fortune.  And knowing my planned dinner tonight, I though well maybe I can make bread. It has a lot of the same ingredients as pretzels, which I typically keep on hand in case of emergency pretzels.  So I searched the ever open intrawebs to find a recipe.  Holy smokes, who knew there were so many different kinds of breads!  With so many different ways to make them! Bread machines, not bread machines, fruit breads, honey breads, braided breads….I guess it took me a while to find something “simple”.  It made me wish I had the recipe for the bread my sister used to make for holidays.  Regardless, I found this recipe which seemed simple enough and doable.  The other best part about allrecipes.com is that it gives you the servings for the original recipe, and will calculate the changes in ingredients if you want to half, third, double, or essentially change the serving size in any manner. HUZZAH one loaf!  So with music thanks to my itunes, now I’m really ready to begin.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup warm water - check
• 1/3 cup white sugar (this confused me until I realized its sugar…like regular sugar) - check
• 2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast (or perfectly 1 packet of the rapid rise yeast! Perfect for pretzels too J)
• ¾ teaspoon salt - check
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil – check
• 3 cups bread flour (google assures me that bread flour is high gluten, and helps the yeast to work yadda yadda, while all purpose flour is a little bit different etc technical mumbo jumbo but all I have is all purpose flour so I’ll be using that)

Starts out pretty similar to pretzels (almost makes me want to make pretzels) with dissolving the sugar and yeast in warm water until the yeast “proofs” which is, I think, just a fancy way of saying bubbles to a frothy consistency. 

Once it has proofed, I put the concoction together with the salt and oil, and slowly mix the flour into my FABULOUS Cuisinart (specifically purchased for pretzel dough making…totally normal).  Wow I love my Cuisinart.  If I hand kneaded the whole thing together it would have taken a while.  Now for an easy cleanup (I’m utilizing my dishwasher while I still have one) while the dough rises in a “bowl” aka a large pot…resources.

When the recipe said “punch down the dough” I was concerned, but no really you have to punch it down and it goes “smoooooosh!” another half hour and then I can bake the thing! Woot woot!  It looks splendid…I do think I oiled the pot too much…womp.

350 for 30 minutes, jeez I can’t wait to eat this bread.  It looks and smells….like bread.

OMG TALK ABOUT DELICIOUS!  Crusty on the outside, soft and yummy on the inside!  Fabulous with that garlic butter I made earlier in the week.  YUM!  Can’t wait to eat it along with dinner tonight too! 

This recipe DEFINITELY gets a +8 for delicious.  +5 for quick clean up, +5 for the Cuisinart making great dough (always does), +5 for the garlic butter.  So happy!