Booyah! Bread!

For once, Gentle Reader, I'm going to write about our bread machine misadventures. I hope you don't mind.

--The Faudie
Booyah! We have bread that looks like bread!

Isn't it glorious, Gentle Reader? Isn't it marvelous? Isn't it a wonder? Isn't it just the most amazing thing you've ever seen?

Okay, okay, maybe it's not all those things, but this loaf is pretty damn special to the husband and me. It is our first true success with a bread machine (the Welbilt ABM-3600), and I cannot express quite adequately how thrilled I am with this loaf of whole wheat bread.

Chide me all you want, Gentle Reader, but I really am that bowled over by our success. I honestly figured that for all our efforts, the husband and I would not be able to produce a decent, respectable loaf of bread. For all the reading and research we did and would probably do to determine where we were screwing up, I truly figured we wouldn't figure out the problems.

Check that. I truly figured I wouldn't be able to figure out the problems and make a decent loaf of bread. Let me try to explain, Gentle Reader. For all my enthusiasm, making bread in a machine--which should be a pretty basic thing to do--I had secretly deduced would be yet another thing I couldn't do right. After all, there are a lot of culinary and other tasks--making drop cookies, sewing, gardening, scrapbooking and other hausfrau-ish tasks--that I've tried very earnestly to learn and accomplish and yet cannot achieve true success. (Or perhaps my measure of success was off the mark. I dunno. I am an admitted and dogged overachiever.) Because I was so excited about this bread-making endeavor, I figured I'd fail miserably. It's...it's just the way my brain works. Chide all you want, Gentle Reader, about my glaring lack of self-esteem, but all the self-esteem-building techniques in the world will not overcome this thinking pattern of mine. It's just who I am. To paraphrase one of my therapists, I really know how to beat myself up.

And I guess I shouldn't be proud that I can do that job really well, huh?

But what counts here is that I was wrong--and happily so!

Honey Whole Wheat Bread

7.5 oz. water
2 C whole wheat flour
1/4 C honey
1 t NaCl
1 T gluten (aka vital gluten, aka vital wheat gluten flour)
1 T butter
1 T dry milk
2 1/4 t active dry yeast (or 1 3/4 t quick rise yeast)

Yield: 1 1-lb. loaf

Nutritional Info
Sorry, the bread machine's manual, in which this recipe appears, didn't include nutritional info. If you're that curious, find a nutritional calculator through Google and have fun!

The Faudie's Futzings
The husband and I made this loaf Sunday evening after I spent a fair amount of time Saturday and Sunday researching bread machine bread-making both online and in whatever books the HPB locations in Cedar Park and on North Lamar had on their shelves. While I learned a fair amount about the art and science of making bread--such as the various names used for gluten and how you can make your own whole wheat bread flour simply by adding a tablespoon of vital gluten for every three cups of regular whole wheat flour you have--I realized the husband and I could be doing a few things wrong. That realization left me with a dilemma: How best could I, through process of elimination, figure out how we were mucking up the works?

So what were the possible things we were doing wrong? Well, for starters we were making bread at the wrong time of day at the wrong time of the year if we wanted to go strictly by the recipe. As I'd suspected before I started researching, heat and humidity do indeed affect how bread rises and bakes and how the yeast acts. The advice the husband and I encountered in several resources was to reduce the amount of water and, should the dough turn out too dry and the kneading blade have problems doing its job, to add more water a teaspoon at a time.

A few other resources also recommended using cooler ingredients instead of ensuring they were at room temperature before mixing as a way to counteract the heat. This idea appealed to me because for as much as I'll think about and plan ahead and strategize such a task as baking a loaf of bread, I'll f'in forget to get out all the ingredients that need to come to room temperature.

We also contemplated the possibility that our Fleishmann's instant dry yeast was no good. After all, I'd bought the stuff about a year or more ago for the husband's misadventures in Chicago-style deep-dish pizza-making. Additionally, my efforts to appropriately store that fairly sizable bag during the ensuing year wound up being pretty abysmal. (I'd like to blame the husband for this problem--he is Captain Oblivious at times and probably didn't realize that the Ziplock in which I'd initially put the bag of yeast had torn or that he hadn't done his best to get all the air out and seal things up tightly--but perhaps the little elves that come out and wreak havoc in my kitchen are to blame.) So what this means is that there's a pretty good chance the large quantity of instant dry yeast we have is no good.

Here was another potential problem: flour quality. As you know, Gentle Reader, I'm a skinflint. Hey, I don't have a lot of money to shell out on ingredients, and by and large, the house brand is just as good as the national brand. And for the most part, minor differences in quality don't really matter. But when it comes to making bread (and pastries and other, more delicate foodstuffs), quality can matter. That said, I suspected my bag of HEB-brand white bread flour along with my bag of Gold Medal unbleached all-purpose flour might be, to put it kindly, iffy for successful bread-making.

Whew! As you can undoubtedly understand at this point, Gentle Reader, we had some fairly expansive issues to work through. Undaunted, we plunged ahead Sunday evening with plans to try out a whole wheat recipe in the newer of our two Welbilts. Here's a quick rundown of how we attempted to address our potential problems:

We bought a five-pound bag of Bob's Red Mills whole wheat flour at Central Markup. Like King Arthur Flour, Bob's Red Mills is one of those larger flour producers that has maintained a fair amount of integrity when it comes to its products, and its reputation (again, like that of King Arthur Flour) is pretty good. Sure, the bag was a little pricier, but here's why I forked over the four bucks and some change for it:

• The company's reputation is good.
  
• The bag had printed right on the front that it was suitable for use in bread machines.

Okay, point 2 is probably the reason we bought the bag. We couldn't find anywhere a product labeled "whole wheat bread flour" as specified in one of the recipes we planned to make. This was on Saturday, Gentle Reader, before I picked up a book on Sunday morning at HPB and discovered that whole wheat bread flour is fairly rare and easy to make yourself by adding some vital gluten to regular whole wheat flour. Pardon my ignorance at the time of purchase!

We bought new yeast. Based on my reading of various yeast-related topic threads on King Arthur Flour's public discussion boards, we bought a three-portion packet of SAF instant dry yeast at a fairly high price--$1.89, almost a buck more than the three-portion Red Star stuff I could have bought at HEB--because, once again, the reputation of this brand as very reliable had me thinking that perhaps by using this reputable product, I could determine if we had experience bad yeast-related problems in the past.

Just a note about SAF and Red Star: They're made by the same company in allegedly the same facility. I knew this tidbit already when we went shopping on Saturday, but despite this knowledge, I caved and bought the brand the bakers on the King Arthur Flour discussion boards "swear by" (yes, they say just that, Gentle Reader, in their posts) just in case. Will I buy it again? I dunno. I guess I'd have to think long and hard if the expense justifies avoiding bad-yeast mishaps.

We reduced the water we initially poured into the baking pan. Instead of 7 ounces, I put in just over 6. I can't tell you precisely because I stupidly used a liquid measuring cup that only has the even numbers marked and doesn't have half-ounces marked.

While the bread was going through its multiple kneadings, we did have to add some water because we could hear the paddle/blade/whatever struggling to work with the dough. All together, we probably added 2.5 teaspoons after the initial 6.whatever ounces.

The Proof Is in the, er, Baking
Since you've already seen the picture of the finished loaf, Gentle Reader, you know how this story ends. I suppose that's a bit anticlimactic after all the build-up with the discussion of research and stabs at possible solutions and whatnot. Sorry to disappoint you. To soothe you, enjoy some pictures of this little baking adventure:

Given how tall the loaf rose and how relatively dark the top crust appeared to us, the husband and I stopped the baking four minutes early. We really agonized over that decision because...well, quite frankly we didn't what to fuck this up at the last minute by being unnecessarily fretful about the loaf burning. Then again, we didn't want to end up with another relatively inedible loaf! As it turned out, ending the baking cycle early was a good decision.

Here is something that is a bit funny about this bread-making success: The machine's manual notes, "This bread will be smaller than basic bread because of whole wheat flour." If you're not sure why the manual's writers included such a note, Gentle Reader, understand that whole wheat flour is denser than white flour, thus it shouldn't rise as much.

Heh, yeah right!

Or perhaps the fact that our loaf rose to such impressive heights is a sign that we used too much yeast or gluten. The recipe also has a note that if the bread rises too much, we should cut back on the gluten by a quarter-teaspoon. Maybe we'll try that next time.

Or not. Tall bread is fine with me!

I do know that the next time we make this or a similar recipe, we're going to use the option for the light crust instead of the default medium (not light but not dark?) crust. I can't see myself ever using the dark crust option, but I'm the kid who refused to eat the bottoms of the Bisquick and canned biscuits made at home because I didn't like the taste of the darkened carby yummies. Of course, I often wind up with somewhat raw dough in the center of the biscuits I make for the boy just to save the bottoms from getting too dark and dry and crusty and crumbly, but...who cares!

By the way, as I prepare this post, I'm attempting a banana bread in the same machine using some of the adaptations I discussed herein and the old yeast. What I've seen so far isn't pretty--but that's all fodder for another post!