baking bread is an essential in my house. there are very few choices of bread at our local stores that i deem worthing of purchasing and most of those are out of our price range. so what’s a mama to do? make it herself of course!
making bread can be very spiritual. it doesn’t matter what recipe you use. i have seen over a dozen recipes over time of fellow women bloggers. each talk about how they love their recipe. i’ve tried a lot of them but what i’ve learned over time is it doesn’t really matter what recipe you use, it’s all in how you use it. i have been fussing with the same recipe for over 6 years now and have just recently mastered it. i can’t even remember where i found the recipe other than online. i took the basic recipe and started tweaking it…when you make the same recipe 3 or more times a week, you start to get bored and experiment. and that is where you start to master your recipe.
for awhile, i added steel cut oats for texture. then i ran out of them. i added flax seed. the family got tired of that. i switched from sugar to honey. that was fun. i blended flours. interesting. moving the loaves further back into the oven. baking them less. cooling them on a wire rack. add more flour at the beginning. adjusting the water temperature. add more flour to the initial mix. add less flour overall. knead by hand in end instead of mixer doing it. and finally, i started ‘proofing’ my yeast…adding it to the warm water with a bit of sugar, whisking it together and letting it sit before i added it to my flour, sugar/honey, salt. perfection!
my recipe is simple. it is a quick 15 minute rise and then into the oven and ready to eat 45 minutes later. but, the evolution was not simple. i had to make it mine before it was worthy. and now, my family raves over my bread. bread from the store? that’s insane. there is NO comparison. sigh. a mother cook’s dream come true! i never understood about how it takes time to really learn a bread recipe until this past month’s aha! moment with mine…watching the evolution, seeing the perfect loaves, tasting the deliciousness of it.
so, here is my recipe. but, i warn you…it may/will not perform for you until you make it yours. the art of baking bread is in the individual cook (and of course, your oven will vary results as well).
cuban bread
4-6 c flour
1 T. salt
2 T. sugar/honey
2 T. yeast
2 c. warm water (100-110 degrees)
first, mix yeast and water with a pinch or so of sugar. let sit.
in kitchenaid, add 5 cups flour, 2 T. sugar, 1 T. salt. pour in yeast/water. mix until combined and forming a ball. add up to 1 more cup of flour but stop if gets too dry.
knead by hand for a few minutes. put in greased bowl, cover with a hot, wet towel and let sit 15 minutes. while sitting, heat a pot of water to boiling.
divide dough into 2 loaves, your choice…round, loaf, or rolls. it is very versatile. place on top rack of oven.o on bottom rack, place a 9 x 12 baking dish and fill with boiling water. close oven and set at 425. bake for 45 minutes. cool for at least 10 minutes on a rack and then slather with lots of butter and honey or homeade jam and enjoy!
I know the feeling. I spent 8 years trying to make the perfect pizza crust. I finally discovered “my” recipe and we’ve been enjoying perfect pizzas.
I also am a lover of baking bread. I have one go to recipe that I use all the time, it’s Irish Oatmeal Bread, but I have several bread cookbooks that I use often to try different recipes. They’re almost always a hit! We haven’t bought store bread in probably 5 years – Hurrah.
So the oven pre-heating time becomes the second rise? Ingenious… I guess that’s where the phrase “your oven will vary results” comes from.
That looks a lot like Grandmother Bread which I’m trying to “perfect” for my family. I’ll have to give yours a try. And Susy, the pizza crust thing is going on at my place too. Unfortunately, when I ask for feedback from Husband, he says “yeah, this one tastes great” and I remind him he said that about the LAST one as well. He likes them all, which makes tweaking very difficult.
I’m really having trouble getting into the bread groove.
A million excuses. I have bad hands, and kneading is hard. I don’t like the no-knead recipe results. My kids don’t do a good job of it, and start avoiding me when they see flour. My kitchen is too small to make a flour-y mess. I lack countertop for leaving dough to rise. My house is cold and my oven pilotless for rising. I use a bread machine, but I don’t like the results well enough to feel compelled to bake more. It takes 3 hours to get one loaf out of the machine, ad I don’t remember to do it early enough. If I start too early, it’s eaten before dinner.
But I WANT to make bread. I feel like it’s a keystone skillset, not just for homesteaders, but for anyone that wants grocery-store independence. There is no point in buying bulk wheat or flour if you don’t make bread.
I know I just have to quit whining and buckle down. I mastered yogurt, love to make stock, can cook up a storm. Bread is within my grasp, darn it! Why so hard for me?
It’s snowing again, and my joints hurt, and that makes me cranky and whiny. I know! Fresh bread would warm up my hands, right? I have a chicken in the oven. Maybe I better go see if I can put a loaf of bread in after it.
Can you please clarify – does ‘T’ refer to tablespoon or teaspoon in the measurements?
Another in a long line of great posts on this blog.
I love baking bread but generally don’t make the time. Usually for me it’s an all day affair since the house is so cold. This one looks like it’s much less time consuming. I’ll have to give it a try.
Thanks.
“so, here is my recipe. but, i warn you…it may/will not perform for you until you make it yours. the art of baking bread is in the individual cook”
That is so true! I love to mess around with bread recipes which leads to not really using a recipe most of the time. I have been doing it for a long time now so I can get away with tossing things in and it usually turns out okay.
Oh Cuban bread…major Yum!! I’ll be trying this!
On the down side, my hub’s doc yesterday read him the riot act and told him No More Bread, No More Carbs and scared the daylights out of him till he (read We) lose weight and etc. Just when I was getting good at it, too!
susy – once you get used to homemade, it’s hard to go back to the store crap they push as ‘bread.’ i need to work on my pizza dough recipe!
eric – yes, isn’t that cool???
meadowlark – i find that as long as it’s homemade, our other halves seem to not care about the nuances we work so hard to achieve.
matriarchy – ha! i don’t knead much with this recipe & with the kitchenaid, it’s not really necessary, i just like to do it.
gavin – T. is for tablespoon, one of the rare times i actually capitalize! 🙂 thanks!
judy – from start to finish, i can usually knock this out in about 1 1/4 hours.
stephany – cooking really is an art, isn’t it?!
thebackforty – bummer! hope the no bread diet doesn’t last long.