Experimenting with bread

I am a sucker for toast but could never afford the really good ones they have at the bakery. So one day after years of eating the same old dollar loaf from Coles I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to bake my own bread. Boy was I in over my head.

Turns out, churning out a good loaf of bread is a harder than it sounds. There’s a lot of technique and variables you need to monitor like the room temperature and how many times you let it rise. Needless to say, during my first attempt left me with bread which looked flat and smelled like wet sock.

So this time I decided to try the same recipe twice with slightly different ingredients and methods.  Besides, how bad can you be to fuck up something as basic as white bread?

For the first batch I mixed the yeast with warm water and white sugar and kneaded the dough three times, each time coating it with a bit of flour too relieve the stickiness.

For the second loaf I used the same recipe but used milk instead of water and substituted the raw sugar with brown. I also super-sized the recipe and doubled all the ingredients. Again kneaded it three times, adding flour when necessary.

And the results?

The version with milk was more fragrant and stayed moist longer. In fact I found that after a couple of days it became firmer and softer, making it a bit easier to slice.

I’m not sure it this is because I left both in the oven longer to counteract the yeasty smell or it’s combination of the fats in milk and brown sugar. I’m thinking next time I might try to work in a bit of butter and see if that makes any difference.

Regardless, it may not be as great as commercial bakeries but it still made one hell of a french toast:

It’s amazing what you can do with just an egg and some salt and sugar. Just chuck some ham/tomato and (cheddar) cheese on top and into the microwave and you got yourself a breakfast that is guaranteed to put in a good mood for the rest of your day.