Scones!

 The scone is a pretty standard part of any coffee shop and is definitely in most any Starbucks. They are usually pretty good but I would prefer to make my own. You get a lot more for your money and I prefer my scones to be a little less sweet and a little more buttery.

I'm sure there is a reason but I have no idea why they are triangles.

Banana Nut Bread! Pure Goodness!

Biscuits!

I am a sucker for a good biscuit. In my experience, the best place to get a biscuit is the south. They know what they are doing. This is a recipe from one of the Junior League Recipe books. I tweeked it a little just because I didn't have all the ingredients but it made a pretty sweet biscuit.
   

It is a super simple recipe:
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
4 tablespoons shortening, I used pork lard just cuz I didn't have any shortening
1 cup milk

You mix the flour, salt, and baking powder together and then put the lard into a food processor and mix until a nice crumb texture.

Then you make a well and pour in the milk and mix it together. It will be a pretty sticky dough. Flour the counter and knead the dough for a few seconds. Then roll out the dough until its about 1/2 inch thick. Then cut out a biscuit cutter or you could do what I did and use the baking powder container as a guide and cut it with a butter knife, but a biscuit cutter is way easier.

Then bake them on a cookie sheet at 450 for 12-15 minutes.

I had these biscuits with butter and jam but they would go great along with dinner. 

Third Times The Charm

I am definitely not alone when I say that pizza is one of my favorite foods. It one of those dishes that most everyone has had and most everyone likes it. It is also something that I have always been afraid to make, just because I had gotten it in my head that anything I made would not be nearly good enough. I decided that if I am making bread I have no business to bake then I might as well try to make pizza. I made the crust the day before. I made enough for six small crusts.
 I put five in the freezer and one in the refrigerator. The next day I took the dough out of the refrigerator and let it sit out and puff up a little for two hours.I then spread it out pretty thin on this disposable pizza pan I bought and the grocery. I set the oven at 550 because that is the highest temperature on my stove. Pizza are supposed to be cooked quickly at very high temperatures. I had made tomatoes sauce a couple days before so I used that for the sauce and about a cup of mozzarella. The first pizza I made I just used mozzarella. This pizza turned out to be very undercooked on the bottom because the disposable pan didn't get hot. It wasn't so great. So I tried again the next day and I mixed some Italian Seasoning in with the cheese. This pizza was better cooked but the cheese lacked salt and didn't taste too much like anything. The third night I mixed in a quarter cup of romano cheese and a little Parmesan and the Italian Seasoning. This time I used my stoneware pan. It was perfect. The crust was perfectly crispy, the cheese was just salty enough and the seasoning gave it a great taste. It was just as good as pizza from a restaurant. 

Time Lapse Raisin Bread!

Sweet or Savory? I pick Savory.

    I am a fan of breakfast. As they say, it is the most important meal of the day. I may have a loose interpretation as to when you can call a meal breakfast, but I love it nonetheless. I am an even bigger fan of eating breakfast foods for lunch or dinner. One of my favorites is the english muffin. The ones you get in the store are great and serve as the perfect vehicle for other breakfast food combinations. These english muffins are delicious by themselves or with some cheese, bacon, and eggs in a do-it-yourself style egg McMuffin. Because these take about three hours to rise and proof, I decided to make these for a  breakfast at dinnertime sort of thing.
   This recipe or formula comes from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering The Extraordinary Bread. I am really into these days and I have been really happy with everything that I have made from it. It makes six muffins.

2 1/2 Cups Bread Flour
1/2 Tablespoon Sugar
3/4 Teaspoon salt
1 1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon unsalted butter or shortening
3/4 cup to 1 cup milk or buttermilk



Combine dry ingredients:flour, sugar, salt, and yeast.
Add butter and milk

Knead dough for 10 minutes until it is tacky but not sticky

Oil a bowl and coat the dough in the oil than cover it.

Let it ferment for 60-90 minutes

Then cut the dough into six pieces and then roll them into balls. 

Put dough balls onto a parchment paper lined sheet pan. Lightly oil the balls and cover loosely with plastic wrap. 

Let them proof for 60-90 minutes 

Then comes the fun part!

Heat a skillet at medium heat and pre-heat the oven to 350.

Spray the skillet with oil then place the muffins in the skillet making sure not to let the muffins touch. I did it in to batches of three or four. Let them brown on both sides in english muffin fashion and then immediately put them in the oven for 5-8 minutes. Don't wait for the all the muffins to be finished on the skillet to put them in the oven. 

They come out looking pretty legit. I felt pretty accomplished with myself when they came out. 

Gosh Darn Good Rolls

Dinner rolls are a wonderful thing, at least I think so. There are a lot of alright rolls out there and some great rolls out there. These were pretty fantastic. My last post was of a white bread recipe that could be used for rolls. The loaf that I made didn't quite rise like it needed to and it was much more dense than it should have been.

 I definitely prefer this recipe for rolls just because this is such a sweet and buttery bread that goes perfectly with a savory meal. I had them with a delicious birthday dinner.

Some lovely flowers from the boyfriend and an adorable card from the mom. 

 This time the bread rose perfectly and the rolls were light, but still  creamy and soft inside. It was just like the white bread recipe in my last post but instead of shaping it like a loaf I shaped the dough into little balls and let them rise a little.

Then you bake them for 10-12 minutes or until they are golden brown.

They are a delicious addition to a meal and not too much trouble, that little extra something to a nice meal. 

The Best White Bread You Have Ever Had Or At Least Better Than Store Bread

Everybody has had white bread at some point. It is a staple in a lot of American diets. It is simple and sweet and ,when I was a kid, it was never in my house. We always had wheat sandwich bread in my house instead. Now I am a huge fan of a good wheat bread, but when I was little it was the forbidden fruit that all my friends had their pb&j on. I am a little more more grown up now but I am still a fan of white bread. This recipe is not quite wonder bread, actually its a grown-up version of the white bread we know so well. It is pretty simple to make. It does not require a starter and you can make the dough and bake it the same day. This dough can be used for loaves, hamburger or hotdog buns, and dinner rolls. It is a sweet buttery bread that goes great with preserves and jellies but is also great just on its own. When I made this recipe I split it in half because I just wanted to make one loaf but just double all the measurements and it will make two 1lb loaves.


2 1/8 cups Bread Flour
1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/2 tablespoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter melted or at room temperature 
1 egg slightly beaten
3/4 buttermilk or whole milk



Mix the dry ingredients, flour, yeast, sugar, salt. You can mix this in an electric mixer,but I don't have one so I just mix it by hand.

Add the butter, milk and half of the egg to the dry ingredients. Keep the other half of the egg for later. You can use it as an egg wash. Mix everything together until a dough forms. Again, you can use an electric mixer but I just mixed it by hand.  It should be a soft, pliable dough. If it is to hard then add a little milk or water and if it is too sticky knead in a little flour. Knead the bread for about 8 minutes. It should be a smooth dough. Oil a bowl and roll the dough in the bowl to coat it.

 Cover this dough with plastic wrap and let it sit for around 2 hours or until it has almost doubled in size.

If you make the entire recipe at this point you would divide it in half if you were making loaves or if you are making buns you would divide it into the desired amount. If you are making dinner rolls divide it into as many rolls as you want based on how big you want them to be. keep in mind the dough will still rise to double its current size. Its up to you. Different people like different sized rolls. For loaves let the dough rest for twenty minutes then shape it into a loaf and place it in the loaf pan. You shape it by flatten the bread into a rectangle and fold it hotdog style, folding in the longer sides inwards so they made a seam and place it seam side down in the pan.

Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 60-90 minutes or until it has double in size.

You can either brush with an egg wash or you can slice along the top and oil at the cut.

Bake for 35-45 minutes at 350

This bread right here is not perfect. It could have risen a little more than it did, but it was pretty darn delicious, and that is good enough for me. It plan of definitely making the bread in the future and making dinner rolls with this recipe. 
                                        

Lemon Cookies That I Like

Alright, it isn't bread but why not. So this is a lemon sugar cookie recipe. It is a little cake-like in texture but that is more of what I personally like. It is a pretty easy recipe.

Ingredients

3/4 cup Vegetable Oil
1 1/2 Sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cup Milk
1/2 cup lemon juice
2 teaspoons Vanilla Extract
4 1/2 cups All-Purpose Flour
1 tablespoon Baking Powder
1 teaspoon salt


Combine vegetable oil,sugar, eggs, lemon juice, vanilla extract. Mix until well blended then mix in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix in the flour slowly or it will puff up everywhere. It will be a lemony creamy dough.

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes

Failure Bread & Redemption Bread

So, sometimes things don't work out and other times things do. This week I made two breads, both of which were called french bread but were from different recipes in different books. The first was a failure bread and the second was a redemption bread. I learned just how much of a beginner I am and that following the directions is not always enough but other times that works out just fine. So, I will start with the failure and end with redemption.

    The first recipe came from Rosy Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. This book has a ton of recipes of all kinds of different breads with tips from what equipment you need to buy to illustrations of various techniques. I bought this book because I had read a lot of positive reviews from various places and it seemed like this was a perfect book for a beginner. 

   

This recipe called for two starter doughs.

A pate fermentee or scrap dough 

 

and a Poolish 

   I made these two starters the day before I wanted to have the bread. I ended up putting the doughs in my bedroom for the fermentation stage because the night before I discovered that  my kitchen was much too cold, so cold that neither dough was doing what it was supposed to. The second attempt the pate fermentee rose and was left in the refrigerator over night and the poolish was left over night in my overly warm bedroom. As much as it was nice that it was conducive to yeast activity it was not so swell for sleeping. In the morning I was happy to see that everything had come out right so far. I thought I was moving in the right direction. 

I combined the two starters and made the dough for the bread. 

So I covered the dough and when it had risen I divided it and following the illustrations as best as I could, shaped it into a pre-baguette shape. Then let it rest for ten minutes.

I stumbled through shaping it into the final baguette shape. I suspect that I didn't quite do this right. 

So my baguette stretching might have been a bit gung ho, it ended up a little longer than I intended. Also as I was moving it to the baking sheet it got pretty badly degassed, meaning that it was pretty deflated when it went into the oven. It wasn't much of a surprise when this came out of the oven.

It was sort of a bummer to say the least. I really did try to baby this dough. I certainly didn't do a perfect job but I felt a tiny bit betrayed by the bread. I don't blame The Bread Bible but this recipe certainly wasn't as fool proof as I thought it was going to be. It was not a very successful night of baking to say the least.

   Now let's move on to the happy ending. This second french bread is from a book I have come to really love, Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. 

This recipe called for just one starter , a scrap dough or pate fermentee.

I  let it rise to about one and half times its original size.

The fact that this worked out was a good sign. The failure bread was starting to cause me to lose faith in my breadsmithing abilities. This tiny victory was a good omen. So I let that chill over-night in the refrigerator and made the dough for the bread the next day.

Then it had to sit and rise and it did just that. It got big and puffy and perfect.

I divided the dough and shaped it into a sort of baguette loaf hybrid. I'm not great at the whole shaping thing yet but appearances aren't everything. 

I let that proof for about 45 minutes.

Then all that was left was to pop it into the oven, get some steam action going with some ice cubes and a spray bottle, give it some time and out came a pretty appetizing something. 

It turned out delicious, the absolute opposite of a bummer. 

I have every intention of trying the first recipe again. I want to make it work. I want every bread I start to work out and for that matter I want most things to work out. Who doesn't? You put so much care into these breads. I had mine in the room with me while I slept. I practically cradled it. So when it doesn't make that jump from tasteless flour to something warm and delightful its not a good time. I had very different experiences with these two doughs, but I got my mojo back in the end. I am ready for the next challenge. 

   

Starting with a Starter

     So, to start off I thought it would make sense to begin with starter doughs or pre-ferments. I am by no means an expert about these things. I am new to this so I am in the process of educating myself about the terms and techniques, so you can learn along with me. Not every bread recipe out there calls for a starter but pre-ferments or starters give the bread a richer taste because the yeast has had longer to break down the grain. It seems daunting when you look at a recipe and it says it will take two or three days to make but it really isn’t as scary as all that. Pre-ferments take very little time to make about ten or twenty minutes. Most of the time required for them is the time you let them sit. It takes a little planning. For me it brings a bit more excitement into the whole thing. In these first days of my bread experience every time I make a starter or a dough there is a lot of anticipation. There is the anticipation like waiting the night before Christmas and anticipation like hoping a science experiment comes out right.

                There are a lot of different starters out there and different names for them but in my brief experience there seems to be three main types. There are the Biga and poolish, the old dough or pate fermentee, and sourdough starters. These starters vary in their flour to water ratio and what breads they are meant to be used in. The biga or polish is stickier and old dough has the consistency of bread dough because is very similar to bread dough in makeup. Sourdough starters are a little more complicated than the other two. The first two pre-ferments only need hours to proof or rise before they are ready to be used while a sourdough starter takes days. 

    Bread is something that takes its time. Its not the easiest thing in the world but if you start off with a good pre-ferment than you are on your way.

I have been baking since I was a little girl and it has always been something that makes me happy in a very simple way and after awhile I've gotten pretty good at it. There aren't many things as exciting as waiting for something delicious to come out of the oven and hoping that it turns out just like you want it. I have found that bread baking can be a really fulfilling thing. It just takes a few simple ingredients and some time to make something really great. It takes some work but the product is so worth it. I'm  new to the whole process but their is a rich tradition of bread making out there and so many resources available. As a college student I don't have a lot of time and my kitchen is pretty small but I still find a way bake. There is such a feeling of accomplishment when a loaf comes out well. Bread is such a simple food that we all know so well but there is something about baking it yourself adds to the experience. For this blog I will be making a different bread each week and describing my successes and failures. I will use various different cook books to see which one's I like best and which one's aren't so great.