Homemade Bread......

[Axxe55]

I absolutely love homemade bread. But I have tried several different bread recipes over the years, and just don't have a knack for making bread. My stepmom, when I lived at home, made homemade bread all the time. Several different types actually.

Last Saturday evening, at the restaurant the wife and I have been frequenting for a few months now, we were talking with the cook and she shared a super easy bread recipe that we tried out. And it was super easy and the bread came out great. We tried it out Sunday evening.

12 ozs. of beer. (any beer will work. we used Budweiser since it was in sale at the store.)

1 1/2 cups of self rising flour.

1 tsp. of salt.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all ingredients well. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Depending upon the size of the loaf pan, might take two of them. Bake for about 30 minutes.

 

[cvgunman]

I absolutely love homemade bread. But I have tried several different bread recipes over the years, and just don't have a knack for making bread. My stepmom, when I lived at home, made homemade bread all the time. Several different types actually.

Last Saturday evening, at the restaurant the wife and I have been frequenting for a few months now, we were talking with the cook and she shared a super easy bread recipe that we tried out. And it was super easy and the bread came out great. We tried it out Sunday evening.

12 ozs. of beer. (any beer will work. we used Budweiser since it was in sale at the store.)

1 1/2 cups of self rising flour.

1 tsp. of salt.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all ingredients well. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Depending upon the size of the loaf pan, might take two of them. Bake for about 30 minutes.

Gonna need some pictures before you eat it next time
Any substitute for the beer?

 

[Axxe55]

Gonna need some pictures before you eat it next time
Any substitute for the beer?

I'm just guessing that there wouldn't be, because I think the beer adds the yeast the bread needs to be bread.

Just guessing. Bread uses yeast, to be bread though. And beer contains yeast.

The two loafs we made yesterday, didn't taste like beer at all. The flavor was very similar to sourdough bread.

 

[kbaxter60]

I absolutely love homemade bread. But I have tried several different bread recipes over the years, and just don't have a knack for making bread. My stepmom, when I lived at home, made homemade bread all the time. Several different types actually.

Last Saturday evening, at the restaurant the wife and I have been frequenting for a few months now, we were talking with the cook and she shared a super easy bread recipe that we tried out. And it was super easy and the bread came out great. We tried it out Sunday evening.

12 ozs. of beer. (any beer will work. we used Budweiser since it was in sale at the store.)

1 1/2 cups of self rising flour.

1 tsp. of salt.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix all ingredients well. Pour into a greased loaf pan. Depending upon the size of the loaf pan, might take two of them. Bake for about 30 minutes.

Interesting. We may have to give this a try. We buy the Rhodes frozen rolls at HEB (when they have them) and they are pretty easy and darn good, too.
Nothing is better than those fresh, soft rolls right from the oven with some butter on them.

 

[Axxe55]

Interesting. We may have to give this a try. We buy the Rhodes frozen rolls at HEB (when they have them) and they are pretty easy and darn good, too.
Nothing is better than those fresh, soft rolls right from the oven with some butter on them.

We have tried those too, and they are great. Same luck though. Can't always find them though. Brookshire's carries them sometimes though.

 

[oldag]

I find bread baking to be absolutely effort free and takes no time at all.

My wonderful better half bakes it...

 

[Axxe55]

I find bread baking to be absolutely effort free and takes no time at all.

My wonderful better half bakes it...

Unfortunately my wife doesn't make bread much better than I do!

 

[etmo]

I find bread baking to be absolutely effort free and takes no time at all.

My wonderful better half bakes it...

I'm lucky enough to be married to a pastry chef/baker.

While she makes baking epic bread look easy, I've found that trying to follow the classical method for making traditional sourdough loaves is anything but easy.

My bread story: For her birthday maybe 20 years ago, part of the surprise is that I'm going to bake epic, traditional sourdough for her. So I buy perhaps the best book on the topic in the world, Bread Alone, by Daniel Leader. Daniel and my wife worked together on many baking projects over a number of years, and she always told me he was a sourdough genius. We used to eat at his bakery regularly, and it certainly tasted that way.

So the book requires that you make a sourdough starter, and care/feed the starter, the longer the better for a more complex character of taste. Some of the most complex sourdough starters in the world have been going for over a century, some for centuries, if you believe the claims. I decided on 6 months.

So for 6 months I'm feeding and maintaining this starter, all in secret, which in and of itself was quite the feat. I'm baking practice loaves when she's out so I get halfway decent at it. About a month out, I'm ordering the last shipment of custom-milled grain for the flour from her favorite mill, and I'm getting ultra-rare pink sea salt from a friend on Kauai, all the pieces moving into place. I ordered this artisan butter from Vermont which was, even back then, like 38 bucks a pound. This is going to be a serious piece of toast.

The big weekend comes. I've got it all worked out, get her out of the house with this friend and that friend, because I need days for the bread to proof and rest and etc, etc, etc. So I spend a while developing the dough by hand, but even Daniel's book says you can cheat and use a KitchenAid or similar to develop the dough for a small part of the time, so I put the dough in the KitchenAid, and turn it on. It starts doing its thing, moving the dough around in a bowl; I've got the timer set for just 2 minutes.

I start to turn towards the refrigerator to put something away, and in that instant, with the KitchenAid and my precious dough in the bowl still in my field of view, a huge cockroach sprints out from nowhere, up into the mixing bowl, and is immediately ground into a million pieces and distributed throughout my precious dough.

And that's the end of my bread story

 

[kbaxter60]

I find bread baking to be absolutely effort free and takes no time at all.

My wonderful better half bakes it...

Then you are blessed.
I am also blessed that way and I know it.

 

[kbaxter60]

And that's the end of my bread story

Okay, I have to ask: you still baked it up, right? I mean, those things are supposed to be pure protein and it's not like you are going to taste it?

 

[Sasquatch]

A wonderful neighbor / new friend of ours gave us some sourdough starter a couple weeks ago. We made bread with it for the first time last week. Turned out great! This is the recipe we used...

No-Knead Sourdough Bread

Full-flavored sourdough bread made with minimal effort and a ripe (fed) starter.

www.kingarthurbaking.com

The prep is easy, its just that sourdough takes longer (because of the time you have to let it rise) but its super easy.

 

[etmo]

Okay, I have to ask: you still baked it up, right? I mean, those things are supposed to be pure protein and it's not like you are going to taste it?

You're right -- I probably would not notice the difference, but my wife is a so-called "supertaster"....she would notice, so in the trash it went!

 

[kbaxter60]

You're right -- I probably would not notice the difference, but my wife is a so-called "supertaster"....she would notice, so in the trash it went!

Okay, fine, we at TGT missed out. Dang.
But you did try again, right? IT was a good plan and well executed for the most part. You tried again?

 

[etmo]

Okay, fine, we at TGT missed out. Dang.
But you did try again, right? IT was a good plan and well executed for the most part. You tried again?

Never again! The only good thing that came of it was that

1) there were enough leftover ingredients that my wife was able to make some really good Pain au Levain, and
2) it serves as an object proof for Steinbeck's truism "the best-laid plans of mice and men..."

 

[MacZC7]

I used the same recipe but with a Four Loco and had one bite and threw it out the window...

 

[Axxe55]

I believe there is as much art as there is science to making good bread. Some people just also have a talent for making great bread. My stepmother was one of them.

I had had homemade bread many times before, but it was usually on some special occasions and such. When My father remarried, we pretty much stopped buying store bought bread! My stepmom cooked at least two loaves a day it seemed! The mixer she used to make bread with, was already an antique when I was a teenager. I'll bet it's close to 100 years old by now.