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Saturday, February 23, 2008

Baking bread

One of Rick's all-time favorite foods is home baked bread. That just PROVES he married the wrong woman :). Typically his grandmother and my mother indulge him, mostly on holidays or when he helps them around the house. Then, today, I decided to bake a loaf of yeast bread. I found the recipe while grocery shopping on the side of a box of hot cereal. It was a very healthy whole wheat loaf sweetened with a touch of honey.
Activating the yeast and assembling the dough was quite simple. It took a bit of time and upper body strength to knead the dough for 20 minutes (nevermind the mixer in the corner of the kitchen that I completely forgot about), but this nice dough ball made it all worth it. I really like the flecked appearance.
The dough ball fit nicely into my one and only bread pan. This pan probably didn't know what was happening. It is usually filled with sweet banana or zucchini bread. Can you see Keeli's handprints in the top of the dough near the edge of the pan? She is such a big helper.
After 35 minutes a nicely browned loaf of bread emerged from the oven. We can't decide if we like this side:
Or this side:
Or the inside!
I may make a few more loaves of bread or maybe some dinner rolls in the near future.

1 comment:

Noelle said...

Yum, that is a really nice looking loaf of bread, Kate'! Congratulations! I'm lucky -- my husband is the breadmaker in this household. We've got a great and EASY recipe for French bread from Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything". Instead of hand-kneading, you use a food processor. I can send you the recipe if you're interested. (He's got a killer pizza dough recipe that even I can make, as well.) As for dinner rolls, Ted got a bee in his bonnet for Thanksgiving to test about 6 or 7 different recipes for rolls. It was like the Cook's Illustrated test kitchen around here that week!