Our Daily Bread

I would like to encourage everyone to try baking bread. It is not nearly as hard as you might think, and the result is so much tastier and healthier than anything on the grocery shelves. Just look at the ingredients on your average loaf of bread. What is that stuff?? Anyway, baking bread has become a relaxing project in our house, and something we do every 3 or 4 weeks. Ever since we got the Kitchenaid stand mixer, we let it do all the mixing and kneading. So that basically leaves us with measuring ingredients and turning on the oven. And waiting.

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Baking bread does take about 3 hours, which means you can't do it unless you can be at your house at least once an hour during that time. It is actually only about 25 minutes of work, for a month's worth of bread, made fresh by you, with anything you want in it, and nothing you don't want in it!

15 minutes to measure out ingredients and watch the mixer knead the dough. Then leave it to rise while doing something else for an hour.

2 minutes to move the dough into loaf pans, then leave it to rise while doing something else for an hour.

2 minutes to turn on the oven and put the pans inside. Then leave it to bake while doing something else for 45 minutes.

1 minute to pull out of the oven and leave to cool.

5 minutes to slice, bag, and store in frigde or freezer.

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=25 minutes of work

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When I bake bread, I make at least 2 loaves, and often 4, at a time. Since I use the stand mixer, the additional work for an additional loaf is minimal. I push the same button to knead whether it is for 1 loaf or 4. Bread freezes quite nicely and tastes delicious defrosted a week or more after being baked. Homemade bread has never lasted in our freezer longer than a few weeks, so I cannot to speak to long-term storage potential. But for 1-3 weeks, we have had excellent results. We slice the cooled bread, then put in a gallon-sized freezer bag. Whenever we pull it out, it defrosts quickly and is ready for use about an hour out of the freezer.

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As a side, note, I do not recommend trying to use a vaccuum sealing device to package fresh baked bread for the freezer. It sucks out all the air. Including all those beautiful holes left by industrious yeast during their fermentation process.

I ruined a beautiful loaf experimenting with the vaccuum sealer recently. Oops.

Our 2 favorite bread recipes are not our own. One, Rose's Basic Hearth Bread (pic above), uses mostly white bread flour with some whole wheat for flavor. It is actually a recipe from the back of the Harvest King flour bag. We have had great luck with this recipe, usually double it, and make it in loaf pans. It has a crusty crust but a dense enough body to hold up well to slicing for sandwiches or french toast. Our other favorite recipe, Honey Oatmeal Bread (pic below), is from the back of the Bob's Red Mill gluten bag. It uses whole wheat flour with some added gluten for dough elasticity and rise.

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Check out our favorite bread recipes or discover your own. Give bread-baking a try! The process is relaxing (you just can't rush those unicellular eukaryotes "farting" away in your dough - ask my 4 year old), the smell is phenomenal, and for 25 minutes of work (ok, 3 hours of time), you can eat homemade bread all month!