Assorted snaps [rain, baking]

I seem to have acquired myself a house-husband. But I haven't yet figured out what that means, exactly. Thoughts? Heh.

Other than that, in case you didn't get the memo, we had some beautiful thunderstorms last night (although they did wake me up occasionally). I guess I won't be eating breakfast on the patio, though, judging by the amount of rainfall.

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I have been baking my own bread lately. It's far, far cheaper than buying bread, if one can find the time to do it. Most fortunately, I have reached the point where I can actually make a decent loaf of bread--for quite a while, I was pretty good at making dense, crumbly bricks that were barely edible. If you ever decide to start baking your own bread, I highly recommend finding a copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. It does a great job of outlining the important steps for baking whole wheat bread, and has a fantastic collection of recipes for other bread-related items as well. For a long time, I was trying to rely on one hundred percent whole-wheat flour, but was having a really tough time trying to get it to the right consistency. So I have taken to adding about one cup of white flour in with the whole-wheat flour.

The other thing that has helped me tremendously with baking is my housemate, R. She has been baking her own bread for a long time, and there's really no good substitute for watching someone else bake bread. She has been a good role model. I don't know why I never watched my mother bake bread--most of what I remember from our kitchen growing up was watching her make communion bread for our church. Her communion bread was some of the more delicious stuff we would get. But it's not the same as loaves of bread because it has no leavening, and she did not really bake loaves of sandwich-type bread.

Here's what I've been doing (maybe next time I will take photos while I do it): put about 2 cups of comfortably warm water in a bowl, and add 1 Tablespoon yeast and 0.5 Tablespoons sugar. Let that sit for a little while, until the yeast starts to get nice and active. Then mix in about 1/4 C olive oil, 1 Tablespoon salt, 1 C white flour, and 2 C whole-wheat flour. This will make a nice, sticky dough, which should be mixed around in the bowl for a while to give a the gluten a chance to start forming. Then I will add about another cup of flour until the dough starts to come away from the sides of the bowl.

At that point, in our climate, the dough will require about one more cup of flour. I spread half of this flour on the counter, plop the dough down into the middle of it, and spread the other half on top of it so the dough doesn't stick to my hands. Then knead it for a while, until all of the spread-out flour is incorporated into the dough and it gets nice and elastic. Coat it in olive oil, pop it back in the bowl, and cover the bowl with a tea towel for the first rise. After it has arisen (in our climate right now, that takes about 45 minutes), punch it down and let it rise again (another 45 minutes).

Then there's the final knead, which is really fun - the Tassajara Bread Book says to knead with one hand, and then use your other hand fold the dough over itself and turn it 90 degrees. It calls this "winding the clock," because it gets all of the gluten lined up really nicely to give the final loaf of bread good structure. From there, shape the dough and press it into the loaf pan to rise yet again. Once it's almost risen, turn on the oven to 350 degrees, and then pop it in and bake it for a while. You will know it is done when you tap on the bottom of the loaf and it sounds hollow (usually around 45 minutes later).



And on that note, time to watch ants again.