Cheap Bread

Cheap Bread (Improved March 13, 2011)

You can make your own bread and get a good upper body workout. I had been managing to buy the $3 whole wheat bread I like for $2.00 a loaf on sale most of the time. (Not organic, not stone ground.) I filled a shelf in the freezer whenever that happened. However, the cost of wheat is raising the price of a loaf of bread to something more like what it's actually worth.

Even using the very best local organic hard winter wheat stone ground flour, it costs about $1.60 for a loaf to make myself. Then I get something like a $6 health food store loaf. I work for forty minutes to get the dough for two loaves started its first rising. Then the rest of the four or five hours I just have to be around to check on it and do the next stages, which take a couple of minutes.

1. Large heavy ceramic or glass bowl
2. Thermometer (from the yogurt-maker) optional
3. Two 4"x9" loaf pans
4. Electric beaters
5. Wooden spoon
6. Large cutting board

• Heat the teaspoon of honey in a small pot, then add the water/milk and heat to 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees C.)
• Put the bay's-bath-warm water/milk in the big bowl.
• Sprinkle the yeast over it and wait no more than 10 minutes.

• Measure the flour into separate containers
  
• Melt the butter and mix the molasses and salt into it

• When the 10 minutes are up, and the yeast is busy making a beige scum on the water, mix together the molasses, melted butter, and salt, then mix into the milk mixture.
  
• Drop in the unbleached flour and one cup of the whole wheat. Beat for exactly two minutes with the electric beaters. This gets the gluten worked up. You can mix it with a spoon 200 times, but it's not quite the same.
• Add one more cup of the whole wheat flour and beat briefly.
  

• Use the wooden spoon to mix in more flour. When it's just barely manageable, turn it out onto a well-floured board.
  

• Wash your hands and the bowl, dry the bowl and grease it with butter. Put it aside.
  
• Knead the dough for fifteen to twenty minutes. First keep folding flour into the dough until it's not too sticky to handle. Then use the heels of your hands to roll the dough into a fat rope. Then pick it up, letting it stretch down and whip it into a knot. Repeat until the time's up. Stretching the dough over and over makes the gluten elastic so the bread isn't crumbly and the texture of the bread will be fine. It's better not to use up all the flour than to make the dough too dry. The dough will be smooth and elastic. You might need a bit more or less flour. Six cups makes a more tender dough, but still a bit sticky.
  

• Make a ball and roll it around in the buttered bowl so it's all greased. Cover the bowl with a tea towel. Pre-heat the oven for thirty seconds and turn it off. Leave the oven light on throughout the risings.
  
• Place the covered bowl in the oven for an hour on a hot day, longer in winter. You want the dough to have doubled in size. It's warm and smells great and feels alive!
  
• Punch the dough down, make a ball again. Put it in the oven for half as long as it took to double the first time, check to see that it's doubled in size.
  
• Grease the loaf pans with shortening or butter (oil soaks in too much).
  
• When the dough has doubled again, cut the dough in half.

Forming the loaves:

• Cut the dough in half and flatten one half into a disk. Start at one side and carefully roll it tightly into a cylinder. If you do it loosely a large air pocket can form when the loaf rises.
  
• With the sides of your hands, flatten the ends as if sealing them off and fold the flat bits under, giving your loaf four corners.
• Put the loaves seams down in the pans. Cover them with the towel and raise the dough as long as the second rising took. Watch it carefully because if the loaves get too puffy they'll hang over the sides and fall in the middle. They should just barely double. They'll rise a bit more on the counter while the oven is pre-heating.
  

• Take the loaves out and pre-heat the oven to 350.
• Bake 35 minutes. Tapping the bottom of a loaf will sound hollow.
  
• Cool before slicing.

I also took a shot of the local spelt flour I use in my sweet quick breads. I wouldn't try making yeast bread with it.

I'd like to hear from folks about their experiences making bread and also whether you feel like it saves you enough money to make it worthwhile. The photo is of buns I made with dough from the bread machine.

Here's a tip from David you might want to explore:

"Inexpensive bread made easy with no machine (OK the oven is technically a machine as is my grain mill)…go sourdough using a sponge method and cut your kneading time way down….you can also use yeast which will cut the whole process time way down…see Joe Ortiz’s Village Baker and Nourishing Traditions for more on this type of baking."

And here are some good tips from a ship's cook who bakes bread daily. I've incorporated some of his advice in my above method.)

I've been baking bread for years aboard our ship Pegasus.

A few pointers......

To rise the bread put boiling water in a shallow pan in the bottom of the oven below where the bread pans go.

Bake it with the water filled pan beneath.

Raise only once...  not twice

Make the dough really soft.. to the point where it just pulls away from the bowl... then knead with lots of flour
on the board and your hands... lots less trouble this way...

Bob's Red Mill makes the best whole wheat flour I've used... I can make loaves using just it... but most others
need white to make a nice product. [This sounded suspiciously like a plug.]

Get the yeast going in the water sugar solution with as much flour as water at first... this makes a "sponge"  and
you can see the action because it rises....

Then add the rest of the flour and knead...

Download a single-page pdf of these instructions. This page is not in the 10in10Diet printable recipes pdf.

Try making pizza dough from scratch with this low cheese, high vegetable white pizza recipe.