Bread

So I'm making bread again.  I have a bread machine, so I can really do this any time I want with set-it-and-forget-it convenience, but it makes 1.5 or 2 pound loaves, and I can't realistically eat it fast enough to get through that much bread.  (I mean, I probably could, but it's not my habit.)  I have a great bread machine recipe book, too.  Most of the loaves turn out too soft for sandwich bread, though.

Instead I'm making Diane Duane and Peter Morwood's bread recipe, in a Pullman pan, because I want sandwich bread that fits in my sandwich containers.  (The Pullman style pan was an adventure in itself; I got it on sale from Amazon, and they initially shipped me a bag of dog treats. ???  I got the pan on the second try.)  Now as I'm writing this, I realize I'm doing the simplified version that was on Tumblr.

Anyway, the first time I made it, my little mixer could not handle the kneading.  It tried, but I ended up kneading it by hand.  The second time I made it was after my husband got me a KitchenAid mixer for an early birthday present, and that's what I've got going right now in the kitchen, kneading the modified version I'm doing.

Modified how?  I mathed it down to an actual 1 pound loaf, since I want it to fit in the pan I've got without overflowing.  That makes it 16 ounces of bread flour, about a quarter ounce each of yeast and salt, 15 1/3 tablespoons of water (just under a cup), and about 2 tablespoons of oil.  That came out fine the first time I made it.

The second loaf I made with the 1 pound recipe was mostly all-purpose flour (I ran out of bread flour), and I added an egg and swapped in milk instead of water; it tasted fine and had a nice texture for sandwiches, but it did not rise well.  (My yeast is getting older, so that may be part of the problem... or I needed more because of the other substitutions.)

This time I've mostly used the base 1 pound recipe, but substituted 1/4 cup of flax meal for 1/4 of flour, and I added an egg again since I think it does well for the sandwich texture.  I did end up adding about a half a cup of flour to get it to come together, so either it's really humid today (probably; we're expecting rain) or I can just add the flax meal without taking out any flour.  I'll find out how that turns out in a couple hours.  Hopefully well, because I made blueberry jam yesterday that is amazing (thank you, Ball Preserving book), and I'm kind of planning on that for lunch several days this week.

Anyway, here's the mixer that's saving me from kneading dough by hand.  It's a KitchenAid Professional 600 series, and he found it very on sale.  I wasn't sure I was going to like the bowl lift, but it's been fine.  It's also like, 25 pounds, so it is living on the kitchen counter now so I don't have to move it much.

So far I've used it once to make meatball mix (I hate touching raw meat and this plus the new cookie scoop were great for meatballs), bread 3 times, and sweet roll dough once.  I think next weekend I might make cookies again to see if the smaller cookie scoop turns out better.  I've kept the old mixer because it's fine for things like buttercream frosting and cake mixes and whatnot, and it's a smaller bowl, so that's less room in the dishwasher when I'm making something smaller.  When it eventually dies (it's about 14 years old), I won't bother replacing it, but it's fine while we've still got it.