Christmas Gifts & Better Nutrition

NOTE: Soon, I will be posting reviews

 of each of the appliances mentioned here.

Guess what I did? I thought I had posted about my Christmas gifts from my family and... The unfinished draft is still sitting on my blog list.

Well, here goes.

For Christmas, I got a stand mixer and a bread machine. Every year, my family asks what I want and I wanted a bread machine. They encouraged me to think of a second item so I asked for a stand mixer.

This is the stand mixer:

This is the bread machine:

I am in love with both of these appliances! I had not used a bread machine since my sister had one years ago. We only ever used ready-to-use bread mixes and I think we gave up buying them because of the prices. The bread wasn't even that good, come to think of it. Well, we have come a long way.

My stand mixer is perfect for my tiny kitchen. When I'm not using it, it fits right on top of the fridge next to the Instant Pot. I had to clean out a cabinet to store the bread machine!

Anyway, I made my first bread today and it came out so much better than I expected. It was slightly salty but that was from using the Food.com recipe. My instincts were to cut down on the salt and add some honey or brown sugar. Since this was my very first loaf, I didn't mess with the recipe, but now I am more confident. King Arthur Flour had a much better-sounding recipe but I wanted to try the simpler one. Bad decision. If you try it, I suggest cutting back on the salt and adding some honey. The bread I made works only because I have some honey butter made up to use on it.

Whole wheat flour/White bread flour mix with chia, sunflower & flax seeds;
turmeric powder and oatmeal

I was using the stand mixer from Day One. I mixed up a from-scratch cake and some frosting. Not very healthy, right? Well, for my next creation, I am going to attempt to make these whole wheat cookies - or rather sables. I will substitute the hemp hearts (which I don't have) for sunflower, chia, and flax seeds. 

My goal is to eventually make both some bread and cookies with some "ancient grains" added in. But I will save some of those ideas as I get money for ingredients.

By the way, for anyone who has considered getting either of these appliances but wanted more detail, go and read every review you can. My family basically let me pick out the ones I wanted and I sifted through a lot of info and reviews. The one thing I didn't find for either was how loud they run. 

The bread machine sounds like a very, very quiet washing machine and only makes noise when kneading. The beeping to signal ending and beginning of cycles was not very loud. I can run the kneading cycle at night and not disturb anyone sleeping 10 feet away in the bedroom with an open door.

The mixer is slightly louder but not annoying at all. I would only run it during the day though. It's not that it's really loud, but it's a more constant whirring than the bread mixer.

I will say that the only thing I wish for the bread machine is that the LED indicated which part of the cycle is currently happening. It's seriously easy to set the machine for bread type/crust shade/start but when I would check to see which kneading or proofing cycle it was on (1st, 2nd, or 3rd) so that I could remove the bread paddle before the last proof start. Other than that, it's perfect.

By the way, the helpful tips listed in the notes to this video are awesome. This is where I learned about removing the paddle so as not to have a hole in my finished bread! Big thanks to that channel.

So, while I hate making resolutions for the start of a year, I can say that I will be saving money and eating better. I whipped up my own version (kind of) of Ezekiel bread for about 40 cents (I'm guestimating here). And I do plan to learn more about ancient grains.

To my family, I want to say again how much I love that they love me!

Peace

--Free

Trying to Make Artisan Wheat (I think)

 Okay, so this is my first time doing bread in the Dutch oven. I'm not even sure if what I am doing can be called "artisan". Because of the type of flour I'm using, I'm not sure if I can call it a true "wheat" bread.

It is wheat, so...

Here's the thing though, I felt so good while preparing the dough. I've been really wiped out lately and with trying to change my diet (again), it's been a drain. This recipe was one of the easier ones because it's a "no-knead" type. I don't have to knead it because it has to sit for 8 to 24 hours to rise.

I didn't take a Before photo. It was after 9 at night and, yeah. But here is what it looked like this morning:

That did better than I expected. The dough is really damp and was just one big odd-looking lump when I went to bed. This morning's dough was puffed and kind of yummy-looking. Before I had to push out the air and get it ready for the 2nd rise.

I changed a couple of things about the recipe, but here is the video I used.

I like this dude. He gets to the point and is very clear with instructions. If this bread is messed up, it's totally going to be on me. 

Like I said, I made changes. I didn't have sesame seeds and I didn't have the flax in seed form. I used pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I literally picked up the cheap packs of seeds at the corner grocery. I do have ground flax and since this is all about a high-fiber diet, I added that. Without measuring. Yikes. I didn't measure the seeds either. I figured the more the merrier and just went for it.

One thing that I really did want to add but held back was some brown sugar or blackstrap molasses. Or vanilla extract. Restraint is the word of the day. I played around the rules enough. I can always test adding things the next time.

As I was writing this, I was waiting for the bread to finish baking. Nervous! But, it turned out to look a lot like the one in the video. I am impressed with myself.

I am pleased! It smells amazing and none of the seeds burned. I am nervous about cutting into it, but... 

It turned out awesome and really could do with another 5 or 6 minutes in the oven (I'm putting it back in).  I am trying to remember what Paul Hollywood says about the seeds not distributing throughout the bake... Still, I am kinda happy.

The one thing I am really disappointed in is that I didn't follow my instincts and add something sweet - sugar, syrup, honey - the bread tastes like organic store-bought bread that is slightly salty.

Okay. So now I know. I will be making more and this time, I am going to add sugar, syrup, or honey. This would be the best thing ever with some sweetness to it.

Peace

--Free

Bake Away The Blues (Bread & Water Roux)

 When I get stressed, baking helps calm me. Stress seems to send signals to my sarc to join the party so my brain might not be functioning well enough to do anything complicated. But I can almost always bake.

October was not good for my life. As if 2020 doesn't suck hard enough, it doesn't want to go out without dragging down as much joy as it can... Can I get an amen?

Anyway.

I spent about 3 days on the couch, not able to move or care. I watched YouTube videos hour after hour after hour. When I started getting sore from laying there, I decided to get up and maybe bake something - bread or rolls from scratch. Then, at some point, I got it into my head that I wanted to find a video on how to make brioche. 

Most videos on making brioche are either too talky. All I wanted was a recipe. I found one and... What a mess. I basically wasted a lot of flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. I should have looked at the comments before trying the recipe because there were a lot of people wondering just what the heck the baker was doing.

Also, I don't have a stand mixer. That seemed to be a must-have for kneading brioche dough. I was discouraged until I found the more awesome YouTube channel ever for baking recipes. The. Most. Awesome. Ever. 

The host/baker/cook in the Savor Easy videos ticks all the boxes for making great instructional videos. The entire focus is on the ingredients and procedure. Tomorrow, I will be trying a new batch of brioche.

Isn't that the best baking video? No frill, no life stories told, just right-to-the-point instructions. I need to learn from her! I'm hoping she has a recipe for babka. I've been wanting to bake one of those since forever.

I don't have the energy to start baking yet. I'm still mostly confined to the couch because, on top of everything else (cue the violins), I have a cold I can't shake. 

But -

Until I can get on my feet long enough to bake, I have been enjoying the Culinary Boot Camp videos from Chef Jacob Burton's channel. 

Like I said, baking/cooking is a stress reliever. I go through cycles of liking either baking or cooking, one more than the other. Winter seems to bring out my inner baker chick.  I don't like complicated baking challenges. You won't ever see me doing anything that involves preparing more than one dough or pastry for a finished product. I will never, ever qualify for The Great British Bakeoff. I like simple things that I can share with family or neighbors.

how satisfying is that?

There is nothing more simple in the baking world than bread, right? Well, I was always kind of terrified of making bread. A couple of years ago, I found a recipe from the Big Family Homestead channel and I made their recipe for Amish Sweet Bread. It was fun and easy and made the apartment smell fabulous. This is the recipe and it's actually called just "Amish White Bread". My bad. They actually have a good playlist of recipes very worth checking out.

I have talked about making Japanese Milk Bread for the longest. I just never felt comfortable with the recipes I found. Welp, Savor Easy has me covered. Theirs doesn't look the exact same as other recipes I've watched, but I think it will be good enough for me. I learned a while back that the secret to softer bread is to add a water roux. Say what??? 

The Water Roux Method

aka 

Tangzhong

Apparently this "water roux" is a bread starter known as Tangzhong and is what makes Hokkaido Milk Bread so yummy soft.

look how soft & fluffy...

The roux is a simple bread flour and water mix that is cooked to thickening. The tricky part is knowing ratios and when to add it. Here is a video I found that best explains the procedure and answers basic questions:

Her instructions are great but I still had questions, like what about how much to add to various recipe amounts? Thankfully, commenters had answers. This one is the most helpful of all:

"The Tangzhong roux should use 5% of the original recipe flour amount, by weight. The amount of water used should be 5 times the weight of the flour used in the Tanzhong roux. The water amount used in the Tanzhong roux should be taken from the original amount of water in the recipe. You are not adding an extra amount of water or flour to the recipe, just using some of the original ingredient amounts in a different way."

The same commenter also had this to say:

"I make the roux in a microwave. Use a pyrex cup. My microwave is 1100 watts. With room temperature water, 25 gm flour and 125 gm water I microwave for 20 seconds. Stir will with whisk. Take temp. Microwave 10 more seconds. Stir, take temp. Microwave a final 5 seconds. Stir and take temp. The roux is at about 65 C / 150 F. This is enough for a 450 gm / 1 lb loaf of bread. Cool to below 55 C / 130 F and add to bread maker."

Note: you can find conversions by asking Google or here is one site with charts.  Here is a graphic. Also, here is a calculator site, if you don't mind accepting the cookies. Ironically.

The only answer I couldn't find anywhere is to the question of when to add the roux. I have decided that, since the roux can be stored for later use, I can add it to a dough before I prep it for the first proofing. I dunno. I will try it that way. As soon as I get back into the swing of things, I will be getting my Tang-zhong. Get it?

If any of you have used or plan to use the Tangzhong method, let me know how your bread turns out.

Peace

--Free

**RECIPE** Amish Sweet Bread (SOOO easy!)

I recently stunned myself by baking a wonderful loaf of bread. I can cook and I can do a cheesecake when the moon is right, but I'm not generally a baker. I've never been patient enough. However... I found a recipe for an Amish sweet bread that is so easy even I can't mess it up. It helps that the people at Big Family Homestead. This link is to the YouTube channel where I found the recipe but they also have a website with a bunch of other recipes and stuff.

This is the video but, for those of you like me who want the thing written out, here is my transcription:

INGREDIENTS (for 4 loaves)

• 4 cups water (almost too hot to touch)
• 1 1/3 cup sugar
• 3 Tbls active dry yeast
• 3 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup oil (I used canola)
• 10 to 12 cups flour (I used all purpose)
• and a bit of oil, butter or lard to grease pans

EQUIPMENT

• 4 loaf pans (mine were about 5 x 9 - or 1.5qt)
• A large bowl for mixing the dough and letting it rise (or "proof")
• damp towels or some plastic wrap to cover the dough
• a surface to be floured for kneading the dough
• a knife or dough cutter for sectioning dough (and for scraping/cleaning kneading surface)
• Cooling racks (I used one of the racks out of my oven)

NOTES:

• It's currently cold & dry where I live so I warmed the kitchen and raised the humidity by keeping a couple of pots of water simmering on the stove.
• Do be patient. My dough needed a little bit more time to rise than the recipe calls for.
• If you do substitute self-rise flour for the all-purpose (I did in one loaf), cut out or cut back on the salt. I cut the salt out and everything was fine, but I might have lucked out.

STEPS:

1. Flour the surface where you will be kneading your dough on later.
2. In the large mixing bowl, dissolve the sugar into the warm/hot water.
3. Add the yeast to the water mix and stir just very enough to wet the yeast. Wait until the yeast begins to foam a bit. This took longer than I expected.
4. Add the oil to the mixture and stir lightly.
5. Add about half of the flour. (NOTE: This is where I blended the salt into this half of the flour to incorporate it well. That way, if I don't need all the flour, I won't have forgotten to blend in the salt.)
6. The first half of the flour (and the salt) will make a soup-like mix. Start adding more flour and stirring, a little at a time until you have a sticky thick dough that you can turn out onto your floured surface.
7. Add some flour to the top of the dough so that you can begin kneading it. You will keep adding flour until you have a dough that is no longer sticky. It took me about 7 minutes(not just the 5 to 6)to get my dough right.
8. Pat or tuck the dough into a ball and put it back in the bowl to rise (or proof) for about an hour - or until the dough has doubled in size. This is where you want to cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a warm damp towel. (The damp towel worked best because of the drier air in the apartment.)
9. While waiting for the dough to rise, clean the kneading surface and re-flour it for later.
10. Take the risen dough and turn it out onto the freshly floured surface and knead it into a smooth ball. Flatten the ball of dough out so that you can divide it into 4 equal parts.
11. Make the loaf shapes by rolling each section of dough into a thick log. Tuck the sides under the bottoms so that it sits nicely into the loaf pan.
12. Cover the loaf pans with your towel or plastic and let the loaves rest for about 45 minutes. (Remeber to pre-heat your oven at about the 35-minute mark.)
13. While waiting for the dough to rest, it's a good time to clean up all the flour where you kneaded.
14. After the 45 minutes, put the loaf pans in the heated oven and bake for about 30 minutes.
15. While bread is baking, set out your cooling racks.
16. As soon as you take the bread out of the oven, turn them out of the pans and onto the cooling rack. (This keeps the hot bread from getting soggy in the pans.)
17. You're supposed to wait for the bread to cool to be easier to cut, but... I sliced mine after about 15 minutes and it was fine!

That's it. It's super easy and most of the time is taken up waiting for the dough to rise and then bake. I hope these directions aren't tedious but I need step-by-step instructions so this is how I transcribed the recipe. I think I had to pause and rewind a thousand times before I got it all down. 

I actually pulled this video up on my tablet in the kitchen while I was making my bread! Here you go:

BENEFITS OF BAKING

It's a mood-lifter
Like I said, I am pleased with myself that the bread came out so delicious. The other thing I discovered is that baking is a great reliever of anxiety and depression. I was having a severe bout of anxiety and couldn't sleep for over 20 hours. The baking gave me something to do that I could do without getting frustrated by the tasks. Later,  the smells of the bread in the oven soothed me a lot. Once I finished those first loaves, I was able to settle down and get some sleep. It was all very therapeutic.

It tasted healthier
I don't want to forget to mention another important benefit to making my own bread and that is the calorie factor. I'm not going to say that eating 5 slices of this bread was the best breakfast I could have had but it sure was better than eating bread loaded down with preservatives. At least I know exactly what went into my own bread and I did not feel bloated and stuffed (even after 5 slices with butter) after eating it.

The more expensive breads are touted to be healthier but they still have lots of ingredients I may not want. My own bread was made with only SIX ingredients - including the water. Here is an article from Naturally Savvy that discusses some typical store-bought bread ingredients.

It was cheap to make
I can get a loaf of bread here in my town for $0.99 - $5.00. The cheaper bread is not always the freshest or tastiest. When I got ready to make my bread, I didn't need to purchase anything in addition to the staples I always have on hand. Now, I don't normally have yeast on hand, but I did this time and it's not something I find too expensive to make a staple item. Not only can I get huge bags of flour and sugar on the cheap, but oil and yeast are not too pricey. Basically, this bread cost me very, very little to make.

I hope some of you get to try this recipe. I love the Big Family Homestead YouTube channel and just saw their recipe for cinnamon rolls... Transcribing takes me a lot of time, but I will work on that recipe when I can.

Here is how my bread turned out the very first time!

Peace
--Free