Bread!

This is a recipe from my grandmother's cookbook.  The family put it together after she passed in '96, and a revamp will probably be happening soon.  The cookbook has dozens of bread recipes, some of them make sense, and some of them maybe not.  (There's a recipe for oatmeal bread, for instance, that does not call for Oatmeal.)  I chose this one first because it calls only for whole wheat flour.

the exact recipe says this:

1 c oatmeal

Pour 2 cups boiling water over this, let stand until lukewarm.  Dissolve 2 packages yeast in 1/3 c warm water for five minutes.

1/2 c honey
1/3 c oil
1 1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c dry milk
6 c whole wheat flour or more

Bake 1 hour at 325 degrees.


This recipe has the opposite problem of most of my blog entries - it is under-descriptive.  I mean, if you didn't know how to bake bread, you would end up with crap.  I, however, did not end up with with crap.  The loaf was dense for sure, and crumbled a lot, but made excellent PB&J's for my bus trip to DC.  (Which also featured homemade raspberry jam.  Yum.)

I made the following substitutions:
I halved the recipe.
I used Agave instead of Honey (what I had on hand)
I used powdered soy milk instead of dry milk (thought about leaving it out altogether but since I had powdered dry milk, I figured, why not?)


I have been thinking a lot about baking bread in the last month, and this is my first attempt.  My thoughts have focused on what I *don't* remember from when I "helped" (watched?) my grandmother bake bread.  What I realized at some point today - I think after my kneading - is that I do have one very helpful memory. My memory is not the ingredients, or even really the process.

As a child, I loved dough.  I would always ask Grandma for a piece of dough, especially while she made bread.  And, although she might feign grouchiness about it, she'd cut me off a little piece, and I would eat it slowly.  I remember how that bread dough felt, how it tasted, how tacky it was, how moist, how squishy.

And really, that's the most important thing about bread - it's consistency.  You can never have an exact recipe for bread.  You can never say "if you use this much water and this much flour it will be perfect" because conditions outside of your ingredients are always changing.  You've got to be adaptable.  And knowing what the perfect bread dough feels like (and BELIEVE ME - MY GRANDMOTHER'S BREAD WAS PERFECT) is a huge piece of the puzzle.

So I'm going to keep baking bread.  This loaf was good considering I hadn't baked bread in years, but there's always room to improve.