The everything about food thread.

[SA Friday]

Learning how to make bread is literally a chemistry lab experiment. You are going to botch a few learning how to do it. Don't buy a bread maker and a big mixing machine. Learn how to make bread in an oven and hand mixed. Expect to make a couple of very large hockey pucks when learning, especially at altitude. You have to adjust your mixtures to get the bread right at altitudes over about 3500 feet. Start out with a basic receipe, nothing fancy. I recommend a baking stone instead of a cookie sheet to cook on in the oven. It seems to cook more evenly for me.

Once you get the basic receipe down, then start to experiment with alternative receipes with different ingredients and expand your understanding of the process. For example, some breads can be made with baking soda and baking powder instead of yeast. Mixing and cooking with baking soda and powder is a different ball game compared to yeast, but may be easier to find if things go bad. Then give unleaven breads a shot after you get a good handle on baking sodas and powders.

Of all the potential foods you might be able to make if things go bad, bread requires very few ingredients and can feed an army as long as you have the grain to grind.

A few hints if you are going to give this a shot; you must keep the yeast in the bread warm and moist to get it to rise. I boil water in the microwave and then put the dough in the microwave with it covered with a hot wet cloth for rising. I repeatedly reheat the water during the two rising cycles to keep it warm and moist. 80-110 degrees F is the target zone. This is the hardest part of making loaven bread. Baking soda and baking powder is very different. Heat and moisture don't matter as much, but I add them very late in the mixture as they react very fast in the mixture. If you take too long after mixing to get it into the oven and set, it will fall.