Survival Sunday 246: White Bread

In Which I Bake Some White Bread!

I know I've baked white bread on here before, but I did a video this week to go along with it!!! The video is embedded at the end, so if you need to skip the blog, feel free to just watch the nearly 8 minute long video at the end!

As ever, it's is wise to assemble your ingredients ahead of time - this recipe called for:
Flour, sugar, yeast, salt, butter, and milk!

This is what you might call a "fortified" bread because it has milk and butter in it. Unfortified breads use water. So this bread had some calcium in addition to any vitamins from the flour :)

The first step was to take about 2.5 cups of the flour and mix it with the yeast.

Once my yeast was mixed into the flour, I measured out my milk, a tablespoon of butter, some sugar, some salt, and plopped them into a saucepan on the stove to heat. The optimal range for my yeast was 120-135℉ (48.9-54.5℃), so I took out my mother's cooking thermometer and kept an eye on the temperature!

Remember to keep your flame/heat low when heating milk on the stovetop.
Burned milk smells nasty as heck.

We're  not quite there yet in this shot...

By the time the heat was right,the butter was melting nicely!

Now came the messy part: I had to mix the milk mixture into my flour/yeast mixture! Time to feed them bread bugs!

And here we see my slurry coming together.

After the initial mix, I added more flour until the dough would accept no more.

As seen here.

At this stage, I had to knead, which is my least favorite part because I can never tell if I'm doing it right and no one was around to ask :| I'll say I did alright, since, spoilers, the bread was pretty good!

Basically, you sprinkle down some flour on a surface and flour up your hands, then you flatten your dough slightly, fold it, flatten it, turn it a bit, repeat folding, flattening, and turning your dough until it... feels like dough, I guess? Sometimes it takes longer than others.

Then you grab some cooking spray - I learned the hard way not to trust myself with oil - and grease the inside of a bowl, deposit your dough lump, and cover it. Leave that puppy in a warm area of your house (like next to the stove or heater). It's best to use a damp towel to cover the dough if you're in a dry house. Otherwise, stick with plastic wrap or whatever you use in its place.

Once you've waited a while and your dough looks twice as big as it did before, deflate it by putting your fist in the middle and pressing down. It will fart on you a bit. That's fine. then you just... gently shape it back into a ball. At this point, you can divide your dough if you're making multiple loaves. How you do this is up to you, but if you have a big knife and some flour on your counter, that's probably the best way. I don't recommend clutching the dough ball with one hand and eyeballing what "half" is while gently slicing away at it with a dull paring knife...

Which is what I did.
Which is why they're uneven...

Let your new twin blobs rise again. I like to leave them on the stovetop while I preheat the oven to 350℉(175℃), but here's a word from the wise: don't leave plastic wrap near the vent at the back of your stove, because it will melt from the heat. Thankfully I caught it early, but I still had to switch it out for some damp paper towel!

Also, grease yourself some loaf pans while you're waiting.

Once your balls have expanded - and yes, I've got the sense of humor of a crass child - you can shape them into loaf-like shapes. My mother's cookbook recommends gently patting and pinching your dough into the shape you like or rolling it out into a puffy sheet before rolling it up. I may do that one day just to make cinnamon roll or cinnamon raisin bread... mmmmmmm.

Anyway, once your loaves are assembled, let them rise again. Another ten minutes or so. Then it's time to bake bake bake! Slide those pans into your oven and bake them for anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes! They may take longer or shorter depending on their size, moisture content, and the weather. You'll know they're done if they make slightly hollow thunking sounds when rapped with a wooden spoon.

Remember to toss them out of their pans when you get them out of the oven and cool them on wire racks so they don't keep baking in the pan! Also so that the bottoms don't get soggy...

Behold! White Bread!

Now, the reason these loaves have an odd marbled effect on their tops is because I spilled probably 4 Tablespoons of canola oil into the initial bowl and had to dump it out, blot it, blot the dough, and generally just made a mess. It did not change the flavor of the bread, so I must've done just well enough that it didn't botch everything lol!

Regardless, these loaves were gorgeous, and when eaten, they were firmer than your average storebought loaf (which I really like, especially for eating warm with butter!).

Have some Glamour Shots!

If you want to know how I did that, I just basically carefully slashed the top of the loaf as it rose.
I used the same dull paring knife I'd used to separate the loaves.

The final slice of bread nestled in its sandwich bag.
I miss it already...

Would I recommend white bread as a beginner's bread? Absolutely. Am I spectacular at baking it? Nope, but it sure tasted alright! You'll probably have just as much luck as I've had, so go for it! Find a recipe online and bake away, brother!

Remember: Start your baking experiments with as few ingredients as possible, work your way up, and don't get too frustrated if you mess up. Timers are your friends, so are thermometers, and you don't need too many appliances to make good food. You've got this.

That's all from me for Today!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC