Best. Bread. Ever.

I've been keeping up with my bread making efforts. Apart from some hiccups a while back where I was using blackstrap molasses, which did not provide enough sugar to sufficiently activate the yeast, it has been going well. But the very best loaf to date was the one I made yesterday.

Here is the recipe:

Fig and fennel seed bread

In the order as written, place the following ingredients in the bread machine:
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs olive oil
1 tsp fennel seeds
2.5 cups flour (I used 1.75 cups white bread flour; 0.25 cups millet flour and 0.5 cups of wholewheat flour)
1.5 tsp yeast
1 Tbs brown sugar

With the dough setting, begin the cycle, then when the machine beeps to let you know to add extra ingredients, add:
1 tsp yeast
4 chopped dried figs

Once the dough is formed, turn it out in a pan covered with parchment paper. Bake at 450F for 6 mins, then at 400F until done (for me this was after a further 28 mins).

Enjoy!

Adventure (x + 1)

An interesting experiment was the addition of cassava flour. Also called manioc, yuca, or tapioca, this is the flour of the tuber of the manioc plant. (Apparently tapioca starch is the same as tapioca flour, but I couldn't say if this is merely hearsay. It is at the least internetsay.)

Although I never knew this before, it turns out that there are TWO different kinds of cassava flour. One is a lightly toasted version, which is brown and a little flaky; and the other is very fine and powdery, a bright white flour. From what I can gather, the latter is more propitious for this kind of baking. At any rate, I added a half a cup of my toasted cassava flour, and the bread machine made a crumbly mess. The great thing about a bread machine is that you can check up on the dough while the machine is doing all the hard work, and salvage it if things are going awry. This is what I did, by adding a second cup of water. After this, the bread machine seemed happier and turned out a reasonable, though very heavy, ball of dough. I let it rise overnight. Because it was so heavy, the dough barely rose, but it was enough to pop it in the oven. I decided to cook it on a lower heat for a longer time, and this seemed to work. I started out on 400 deg F for about 7 minutes, then dropped to 350 for 32 more minutes. It could have done with 3 more minutes at 350, but the bread was actually cooked... and to my very pleasant surprise, this very chewy bread was incredibly tasty. With some passion fruit (granadilla) jam... Wow!

Adventures 8 through x

Since buying my Breadman TR550, I have not bought a single loaf of bread from the store, but I do eat bread daily. So as you can imagine, I soon lost track of the number of loaves I made.

I did document my efforts in pictures, and these are displayed here!

I've stuck to the same basic recipe as given in Adventure 7 below, with one important exception: I discovered powdered buttermilk. (It's called cultured buttermilk and the company that makes the brand I use is saco foods [sacofoods.com].) This is like a secret wonder ingredient. It makes the bread much fluffier and tastier. After putting the liquids and salt in the bread machine (1 cup of water, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbs olive oil), include 4 Tbs powdered buttermilk. Then add your 2.25 cups of flour, your 1.25 tsp of yeast, and your 1 Tbs of molasses drizzled over the yeast. On the dough setting, my machine beeps after 32 minutes, at which time I throw in the remaining 1 tsp of active dry yeast, along with another fun ingredient: dried cranberries. I aim to try my hand at throwing in dried figs soon.

I've also been experimenting with other kinds of flour. The millet flour from the Indian grocery store where I get cool stuff is a grey color, but I often substitute half a cup of millet flour for white or wheat flour and it turns out great. I've even included both millet and besan (chickpea / garbanzo) flour at the same time - totaling about half a cup of the flour.

Coming soon: sorghum flour, buckwheat flour, and cassava flour!

Adventure 7: Garbanzo flour bread!

OK, so I think I have this figured out! Basically, to make a good loaf of bread, you need about 2.5 cups of flour; 1 cup of liquid; 1 tsp salt; 1 T olive oil; 2.25 tsp active dry yeast; and 1 T molasses. The liquids (minus the molasses) go into the machine first; then the salt; then the flour; then the yeast, and finally the molasses covers the yeast to help it activate. The yeast also needs wheat gluten to do its thing, so some wheat flour is necessary.

In this particular loaf, I used 1 cup of garbanzo flour together with the 2.5 cups of regular all-purpose flour. Buttermilk was the liquid I used. Setting 11 on my machine is just for the dough; so once it was done, I let the bread rise for about 20 minutes. By then I was getting really hungry, so I fired up the gas oven to 450, popped the bread in, after 5 minutes dropped the temperature to 400, and baked it for another 25 minutes.

I discovered another couple of useful tricks: Just before leaving the dough to rise, I coated it with flour. Just before popping it in the oven, I drizzled some olive oil over the loaf... It came out delicious with a nice soft brown crust. Highly recommended.

Adventure 6: Buttermilk and corn flour bread

Corn flour makes bread very heavy so it tends not to rise as well. It also gets very dry by the third day or so... I may not be using it much. But this was a pretty successful loaf. It certainly tastes good warm out of the oven! I substituted less corn meal than in my previous attempt - maybe half a cup or so; and used buttermilk as the liquid.

Adventure 5: Buttermilk bread

This was my best bread to date. It tasted great, had a perfect consistency and was really tasty right out of the oven. I substituted buttermilk for the water, but otherwise left the standard recipe unchanged. The dough rose overnight, but unfortunately it had dropped back down by the morning, and I never had time to let it rise again before baking! Nevertheless it came out great. It baked in my gas oven, at 450 for the first 5 minutes, then down to 400 for the next 25 minutes or so.