Homicidal Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the Kitchen

As you know, I’ve been fighting with flour in the kitchen.

I started out my bread baking frenzy trying to reconnect with the “Olde wurld of ye Bakerie”.

Yea. Right. The reason we don’t do things today the same way people did them in the middle ages is because the new equipment and technology is better.

Take for example the yeast used in bread making. Back in the day, you had to grow your own yeast. Now, I *could* grow my own yeast by putting the yeast I have into butter milk and letting it eat all the buttermilk up and then form into a sort of cake that I could put in the sun and let dry. However, this process would probably not produce the same consistent results that Brewer’s uses to make their yeast under controlled conditions. I could use chemical leavening (baking soda) but honestly, the yeast gives the bread a better flavor than chemically leavened bread.

I could also use the old world stone ground, kernel casings still present flour. Yea… I tried this. It was horrible. The kernel casings are VERY strong and the yeast just couldn’t puff up enough to make the dough rise and I ended up with very sweet, very hard bread.

So, after many hours in the kitchen, I’ve discovered a perfect white bread recipie.

1—use a good, non-allpurpouse flour.

2.—NEVER use self rising unless you just want to make biscuits. =) Self rising makes great biscuits. =)

1 ¼ cups warm milk

1 packet yeast *** active dry only *** Rapid rise / instant yeasts are NOT Scottish.

3 tbs butter

1 cup oatmeal

3 tbs sugar

3 cups King Arthur “best for bread’ white flour (k.a. is the brand, it’s just a good brand… damn good. $2.68 / bag)

1 tsp salt — > you *need* to salt the bread, damnit. If you don’t, then you get bread that hardens up too quick.

I know it seems impossible to dissolve 1 ¼ cups of liquid in 4 cups of flour / oatmeal. It’s possible.

Mix it all up, stir vigorously with a fork until it thickens, then work it in with fingers, dump it out onto the counter. Dump it out in front of the wife. They love to see the mess in the kitchen and their burly manly man covered in flour. *grin*

Use a rolling pin to knead out the bread into a sheet, fold it twice, turn it 90 degrees left (NEVER turn it right. Ever.) and repeat this process for 15 minutes. You should be sweating at the end of it. If there’s no pain, you can’t make bread.

Ball up the dough by holding it in your hands and pulling the dough from one side of the ball to the back of the ball. Keep doing this. If the dough is tearing while you do it, you get to go back to kneading for another 5 minutes. If it’s cracking, go back to kneading for another 5 mins.

Kneading makes long strands of protein called glutens that give the bread a nice texture. =)

Put the dough back in the mixing bowl now and note how high the dough is. Here’s where there’s a bit of a quandary. Recipes say to let the dough “double” in size. Bullshit. The dough is in a ball form… and since the volume of a sphere is 4/3*pi*r^3, you can’t just wait til the diameter of your dough doubles. If the diameter doubles, the volume actually goes up 8 times! Fscker bread making idiots never could do well in math or chemistry!!!! Noooo! They want to eye ball everything. This is chemistry and math, damnit! You can’t eyeball anything!

Ahem, you want your bread’s VOLUME to double. So…

4/3*pi*r^3 = 8/3 *pi*(r+x)^3

*magic happens*

X=?? hmm. It’s been along time since I’ve done any math… how the hell do you solve these 3^rd order equations…. Bah. Anyone want to solve that eq for me? I seem to remember it had something to do with finding an algebraic denominator that allows you to divide stuff out.

On to an easier equation:

X^3=2 =) x=1.26.

So, you need to increase the size of your dough by 26%. The recipe above makes about a 2 inch radius ball of dough. So it should grow from being a 4 inch tall ball of dough to a 5 inch ball of dough. Not bad. But the dough expands asymmetrically. It grows more in the middle than vertically due to gravity. So you can expect to have it grow by about 0.5 inches. W00T!

This is the L33T way to make bread.

So, the dough ball rises by a ½ inch. This takes about an hour if your kitchen is 75 degrees. I prefer to turn the oven on for 90 seconds and then turn the oven off and then put the bread into the oven 60 seconds afterwards. Then the dough only takes about 30-45 minutes to rise.

Dump the dough onto the counter. Again, do this in front of the wife. Preferably after she cleans up the mess you didn’t get earlier. Roll the dough out into about a ¼ inch thick rectangle that’s 8 inches across on the short side. Now comes the hard part. ROLL the dough up starting at the short side. Keep pulling the dough towards you as you roll, keeping tension on the outside of the wrap. Try not to get any air in it or your bread will have those irritating holes that the jelly falls through when the wife is watching. Once you get to the other end of the dough, pinch the dough onto the roll to get rid of the seam as much as you can. Then poke the ends inside and pull and pinch the sides together and pull them to the seam side and then pinch the seam side together. DON’T RE-KNEAD THE DOUGH on this step. If you do, you will have a loaf that doesn’t rise.

Put this loaf back into the oven or on the counter and let it rise. It should go into a 9×5” baking pan. These pans are about 3 inches high. Let the bread rise for about an hour. It needs to be 1 to 2 inches above the rim of the pan. I usually start baking it when it’s 1 inch above. This rise took about 75 minutes for me in a 75 degree kitchen.

Preheat the oven to 350 (always, always pre heat….). Bake for 35 mins, remove, tap with a spoon, listen to the lovely hollow sound. Then show your loaf to the wife. She’ll wrinkle her nose the first few times you show her. But eventually she learns that you are happier if she says, “wow, it’s pretty, honey”. LET IT COOL FOR 30 MINUTES ON YOUR STOVE BURNER. (Don’t turn on the stove burner, mkay?). It has to cool or else you’ll mangle it trying to cut it. Cut with an electric knife into slices and put it into one of the bread bags you saved from store bought bread. =)

I’d give you a pic of this bread, but um… well… I took ½ the loaf to work and everyone has eaten it. =( It makes a really pretty crust that’s not too tough. You can see the bits of oatmeal in the bread and the taste is just divine. =)

=)