Baking, Beer, & Bach

Recipe Time: Sammich Bread for Beginners

The thing everyone always tells you about baking is that it’s precise. Everything must be measured exactly and timed perfectly.

This is false. 

Ok, maybe not entirely false. Your first few recipes should probably be followed pretty literally. But once you’ve made a few loaves and baked a few cakes, it’s time to experiment and move more by feeling than by measurement. Baking is mostly about patience and attentiveness. A good loaf will take a fair amount of time, and will require you to pay attention to how the dough looks, feels, and smells at every stage. That said, there’s a lot of time to sit and read, watch TV, or get quietly drunk whilst baking.  

This is my method for Ye Olde Sammich Loaf. This particular varietal was a hearty whole-wheat oatmeal, but the same method produces a beautiful, creamy white, or a delicious cinnamon raisin, or a lovely herbed bread. 

First, gather ye ingredients while ye may. This will make one small loaf pan worth of bread, or one small-ish free-form loaf. Who needs pans? 

4 cups flour (all-purpose, whole wheat, white…whatever you’ve got)

A Handful of rolled oats 

2 teaspoons salt

3 tablespoons (or more!) honey 

2 teaspoons instant yeast

About two cups of liquid (more on this later)

Throw everything except your liquid into a mixing bowl. If you’ve got a Kitchen Aide, awesome. Find your dough hook and slap her on there. If you don’t have a Kitchen Aide, grab a wooden spoon and put on your hard work face. 

Look at all those ingredients!

Here’s where we can talk liquid. I’ve baked this basic method of bread using water (good), milk (real good), whey from cheesemaking (rull good), and beer (of course that shit was good.) This particular time, I had about two cups of whey, so I decided to use that. While mixing your dry ingredients, slowly pour in your liquid. It’s going to take somewhere between 1.5 and 2 cups of liquid to form the right consistency of dough. This varies depending on humidity, what sort of flour you’re using, and what liquid you’re using.  What you want to happen is for the dough to form a reasonably homogenous ball, clinging to the dough hook and leaving the sides of your mixing bowl clean. 

Oops. That’s a bit too much liquid, my friends. Ah well, we can always add more flour in the kneading process. 

Turn your dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and have some extra flour standing by. This is my favorite way to knead: flour on hands. Fold dough in half like a hotdog, turn 90 degrees, fold dough like a hamburger. Repeat ad nauseum. You want the dough to feel soft, slightly tacky (but not sticking to everything tacky!), and very pliable.

Here’s a trick to see when you’re done kneading. It’s called the window pane test. Cut off a small hunk o’ dough. Stretch it gently with your fingers as thin as you can. 

Left: Not ready. It fell apart!  Right: Ready! You can see light through the translucent bits of dough. It’s a window!

When your dough does that, you can stop kneading. She should look something like this.

 

Form your dough into a rough ball, and then let it sit in a greased bowl for about an hour or so. Cover it with a lid, a damp towel, or plain ol’ plastic wrap. It should puff up slightly. 

Reward yourself for 98% of your work with a glass of your beverage of choice. 

After an hour is up, turn your dough onto your kneading surface, and get ready to shape it. For a traditional sandwich loaf, squash your dough down into a rough oval. Get out a rolling pin (or a pint glass, or a bottle of wine), and roll it into a larger, more uniform rectangle. You want the rectangle to be about two or three inches longer than your loaf pan. When that size is achieved, roll your dough tightly up like a cigar. Fold the ends under, and throw it in your (generously greased) pan. Cover lightly with a slightly damp towel or plastic wrap. 

To make a free form loaf, the simplest shaping technique is to form a ball with your dough, gently forming a belly button-like seam at the bottom of the ball. Let it rise on a baking sheet or piece of parchment paper, and then either slide it onto a preheated baking stone or bake right on the sheet. 

In a perfect world, your bread will rise in about two hours*, billowing beautifully above the lip of your pan. When it’s doubled in size, put it in a 450 degree oven for 15 minutes. Turn the loaf around after fifteen minutes to ensure even browning, and reduce the oven temperature to 400. Finally, reduce the temperature to 350 and leave the bread in for about another ten minutes. We want the loaf to sound hollow when tapped. If it’s browning too quickly, a tent of tinfoil is your friend. 

*But Claire, it’s like 11:30 and I want to go to sleep/go out carousing. Is there any way I can put this on hold for the night and finish my baking masterpiece later? That’s fine. When I made this loaf last night, I only used about 1.5 teaspoons of yeast, which resulted in a long, slow rise. So I went to bed and let my bread do it’s thing in a cool spot by my window. Voila - by next morning, it was prefectly doubled in bulk and ready for baking. You can throw your bread in the fridge overnight, or for anywhere between 6 and say, 24 hours. This slower rise can often result in a more tender, flavorful bread.  And everyone love that. When you’ve decided you can be bothered to finish baking, proceed to my baking steps listed above. 

When you take your baby out of the oven, I like to brush it with a little butter right away for a soft, sweet crust. Awww yeaaah. Here’s what it will look like: 

Ok, it’s a little too dark. I should have foil tented. 

Left: Here’s what it looks like inside:  Right: And here’s what it looks like as a toasted tuna melt:

 

There! You made bread. That wasn’t so hard, was it? 

Claire’s Theory of Social Media

Here’s how I see Tumblr fitting into my view of social media, with descriptions in the form of overly long and anachronistically profane Victorian novel titles: 

Twitter: Inane Shit, or How Clever Can I Be in 140 Characters?

Facebook: Mundane Shit, or How Many Posts Before My Friends Think I’m Spamming?

Reddit: Embarrassing Shit, or How Can I Keep People From Finding My Username?

Tumblr: Verbose Shit, or How Many Words Can I Write Without Saying Anything of Value?

I started a Tumblr, despite my objections to the lack of “e” in the name, mostly to procrastinate going to the gym. Or baking cupcakes. Both of which are things I actually want to do.

I’m having the horrifying experience of feeling too old for this shit - it took me a pathetically long time to figure out how to change my url, and clearly I just gave up thinking of a title for Bloggy.

Times have changed since my Xanga days.

Perhaps I’m being a bit unfair to ol’ Tumblr. It may end up being quite a useful place to store and share recipes, or go on about concerts, or to chronicle my inevitable stumble through homebrewing. Keep twiddling those dials, stalwart Tumblees. The next password will be “Whisky”.