Home baked bread part 2 - Successes and Disasters!

 

It's becoming a bit of an obsession, the quest to bake perfect crusty bread. This weekend my wife and I (who are bonding over a shared love of baking bread, who knew that something so simple could give us a common interest!) decided to try out some of the other recipes in our bread maker book. 

Baguettes? How on earth do you bake a baguette in a breadmaker? Well you don't really, but you can do all the fiddly prep work and raising and proving and resting in the breadmaker before hoisting out your perfect dough, folding it in a special way (yeah, there really are 'special ways' to roll and fold dough to produce perfect baguettes) before baking 'em in a normal oven complete with its own steam bath. 

This is something we'd heard a few bread makers mention - that sometimes you need to shove a deep dish full of water in the bottom of the over while baking to get that absolutely perfect crunchy crispy outside crust, with a lovely fluffy bready middle. 

By jove it works! So the pic to the left is the outside...

...and the pic to the right shows what it looks like when sliced open. Fair enough, more like a pave than a baguette (we still use a mix of strong white and wholemeal flour) but this was probably the best tasting baguette I've ever eaten outside France, and the perfect accompaniment to some whipped feta cheese and some sun-dried tomatoes (oh god shoot me, I sound so middle class and I'm really not!)

We got cocky though the next day, opting to break out our rye and spelt flours to try and make a seeded loaf with some nigella seeds in it. 

The big mistake this time was believing a blog entry about how to mix up spelt flour. Though the theory was sound, we suspect that rye and spelt flours demand different handling than strong wheat flour. The results nearly wrecked our brand new breadmaker, and I didn't take any photos of the poorly baked / poorly mixed misshapen monstrosity that came out of the breadpan. 

Confidence knocked, I decided it was time to go back to basics, mainly to prove we hadn't knackered the machine. So back to the type of loaf we started off baking, which by now we can probably bake in our sleep...

This time, the flour was a 200g mix of strong white bread flour and 200g Marriage Seeded Wholemeal Flour. Mix that with 280ml of water, a tablespoon of butter, a tablespoon of sugar, 1 teaspoon salt - then a teaspoon of yeast in the yeast hole in the lid of the breadmaker. 5 hours later, out comes the loaf pictured to the left. 

This is now our go-to bread of choice for the week. We bake this about twice a week, far tastier and more satisfying than shop bought bread (which I had to eat for the first time in a couple of weeks this morning - and was not satisfied with at all!)

I'm currently reading up on how you deal with different flour. As the bread machine comes with a weird slotted kneading arm, I'm guessing that this is what we should've used to mix and aerate our heavier dough, and we definitely shouldn't have trusted any blogger that claimed a heavy loaf would be proved, risen and baked in any less time than our 'go to' loaf. 

The other thing I'll be doing this week is getting "Arfur" 

our sourdough starter 'started'. The bread machine claims to quickstart a sourdough starter (quick start in 24 hours rather than it taking a week) but we'll see. Lesson learned from trying to get too cocky!