Succumbing to the middle-class obsession with baking your own bread

 

I almost groan inwardly every time I go searching on the internet for a 'simple' bread recipe, only to be met by the sort of irritating willy-measuring that takes place every time men (and yep, it's always men alas) get involved in any kind of undertaking. Whether it's dick-swordfighting over the best barbecue rubs, or talking about sourcing artisanal (with the emphasis on the 'anal') chick peas to hand-make their own hoummous, men seem to have an uncanny knack for making the simplest things seem like some sort of arcane inner knowledge that very few blessed souls will ever attain. What a bunch of cobblers - honestly, if you don't believe me just do a quick google search for "Sourdough Starter" and read the absolute crap people spout about getting one going...!

So bread. How hard can it be right? A little flour, a little water, a pinch of yeast. a little sugar, bung 'em all together and out comes a loaf that's vaguely edible. That's the theory, but we recently succumbed to the ultimate in middle class fuckery when we bought a breadmaker. 

We'd been talking about it for ages. Sick and tired of the sort of disgusting spongecake mess you get when you buy bread from a supermarket, we figured that it would be worth a couple of days of our week to bake our own bread - and a breadmaker would help with all the fiddly bits that we don't have the time for. 

I must admit that when it comes to any form of technology I'm an uber-cynic. I simply can't get my head around the fact that a machine exists that you can have sitting in the corner of your home, that does EVERYTHING for you and plops out a loaf of bread. 

BUT my wife was convinced, and as all us married fellahs know, what the wife says goes so we bought one, and tried out our first experiment. Pizza dough - the simplest recipe in the extensive sprawling manual for the Panasonic 2550. Pizza dough prepped in the breadmaker but then taken out and finished in the oven. 

Sadly the first attempt was....disappointing to say the least. A combination of old yeast and not enough proving time meant that the pizza dough wasn't puffy, or even thin and crispy, it resembled my worst hand-made attempts so we wrote it off as 'first is worst' and did what we should've done in the first place, got all the right ingredients first before launching into this bread making thing. 

The only poncy bit

I'm seriously not going to emulate every other bread-making blog post out there by marvelling at the wonders of a proper prehistoric spelt-based flour sourced from the upper reaches of the Nile Delta, made from the finest Egyptian wheat or any of that bollocks, I'm going to simply tell you that for a shade over £2.50 you can buy some really good flour to use in your bread maker. We use the Wessex Mill stuff, it's cheap, it's bloody good, tastes great and it's made not too far up the road from us (but is available country-wide). For some reason we only ever seem to be able to find it in our local garden centres so try there if you fail miserably to find it in your supermarkets. But basically start off with a good half kilo bag of strong white bread flour and a half kilo of wholemeal, seeded or rye flour and you're well on your way. 

Yeasty yarns

Most bread maker instructions will tell you to buy the right kind of yeast. Fast-acting, the finer grained stuff, make sure you use that! Only I didn't read this before I went yeast shopping so ended up with the usual slow-acting dried yeast that Allinsons make (the stuff that comes in a tiny little tin). 

And you know what? It worked just as well so that's another myth busted. The key thing with yeast is make sure that it's not been sat in your cupboard for month after month unused - that really is important, it does need to still be alive at least!

Juggling time

Any breadmaker worth its salt comes with two important things: 

1) A removable 'bread bucket' - that metal bit that you take out of the machine to load up with all your ingredients

2) A dough hook. And yeah, it is supposed to be that 'loose' so don't stress about it, it's not broken or anything and you won't lose your teeth chowing down on it when it's sticking out of the bottom of your first loaf, you'll be able to remove it easily. 

So here's the recipe we used for the loaf pictured at the top of this article

• 160g Seeded Wholemeal Flour
• 240g Strong White Bread Flour (you can alter these two around depending on whether you like your bread a bit more 'brown' than white - my lot are fussy so strong white bread flour won out)
• Approx 320-350 ml of water (again depending on the type of consistency you want)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon yeast (don't use really old stuff!)

Various breadmakers differ but we added these ingredients in the order shown above. The yeast goes in last in a special little 'yeast dispenser' which makes a satisfying 'clunk' as things get going. 

We set our bread maker to the 4 hour "Wholemeal" setting, medium loaf size and tentatively pressed the 'go' button. 

After a while you puzzle over why nothing seems to be happening. On our Panasonic, it seemed like the durned stuff was rising / proving / rising for AGES before it actually started the important bit of baking, but boy howdy once that baking cycle starts and your entire house begins to fill with the smell of baking bread (to the extent where we had to open all the windows in the house as it was a bit TOO much!) you'll know something's cooking. 

Once the machine did its little 8 beeps of win, we were ready to open the lid. I swear, opening the lid of a breadmaker is like opening Dracula's coffin. You're never quite sure what you're going to see. But what we were looking at was what you see in the photos ahove. It looked like a loaf of bread, it smelled like a loaf of bread. It was nuclear hot so we turned it out of the bread bucket as quickly as possible (a bit of juggling with oven gloves which aren't exactly the most deft thing to manhandle a breadpan out of a breadmaker while wearing!) and our crispy hefty loaf was on the cooling rack. 

Torture!

Stupidly we left it till late in the evening to get the loaf going, so we couldn't devour it straight away. We lovingly wrapped it up in a bread bag (a stupidly expensive plastic lined hessian bag but if you're sensible you would wrap it in a tea towel, and stick it back on your cooling rack) waiting for sandwich making the next morning. 

I'm old - so having unsliced bread isn't something new to me, but I learned one valuable lesson from my dear old Nan all those years ago - that using a smooth serrated bread knife to slice bread is the best way. 

Getting the bread out of the bag the next morning I was surprised to find that it had the same 'squidge' as a shop bought loaf - nothing like any of my non-bread-machine attempts, which could comfortably be loaded into a cannon and fired at enemy ships to bring them down. This was soft, pliant but sadly not crispy and crunchy like I wanted. Lesson learned about putting even slightly warm bread in a plastic-lined expensive bread sack I guess!

HOWEVER it wasn't a total disaster. It sliced beautifully, it didn't have massive air bubbles in it like shop-bought bread. It had a nice consistent crumb, the only gappy bit was where the bread machine paddle stuck in the bottom of the loaf (unavoidable sadly but a tiny price to pay for real bread). 

The stunning conclusion to this tale is that the bread tasted amazing. I mean REALLY amazing. Full of flavour, not as tough as old boots but very like supermarket bread (so perhaps we need to use a bit less water next time to make it a bit less spongy) but spread butter beautifully, and made a great pair of sarnies for my hungry girls to take to work / school art club with them. Even my father in law, the Paul Hollywood of the family, proclaimed that it was a very good first attempt (this is as much praise as Dad in Law is capable of so we'll take it!)

So now I'm (bread) hooked. The machine I was cynical about has actually proved (hah all the bread puns!) its worth and I can't wait for the next go.