What’s for Breakfast?

With new camera in tow, I made my usual breakfast bread. We slice and freeze this loaf, pulling and toasting a piece to eat each morning en route to work. Usually peanut butter or someof my home-made jam is involved. Most recent jam involved black currants, but that’s a different story.

The loaf starts with the dry ingredients. I love spices, so breakfast bread is a creative outlet. A normal loaf has cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, orange peel and cardamom. Not many bakers use cardamom, but a smidge in your baking makes things taste as good as they smell. I hate it when a baked item smells yummy but tastes flat. Not so with cardamom. I use Penzey’s spices and extracts. They are high quality and you can buy in bulk. There is no middle man, so prices are great. For the cost of a small bottle of cinnamon in the grocery store, you can get a 4 ounce bag of very high quality cinnamon from Penzey’s. Who doesn’t have old spice jars to reuse? OK, if you are the ONE person who does not, you can buy it the first time ina jar, then refill it from the larger bulk bags. I use about 1.5 t of cinnamon and 1/4 t of everything else. If I can get TRADER JOE’S Pumpkin Pie Spice blend, I throw in 1.5 t of that as well. It is a wonderful blend for most baking, but seems to be available only around the holidays.

To the spices, I add 1.5 teaspoons of kosher salt (Morton’s), 2 Tablespoons of dry milk, 1 tablespoon of Bob’s Red Mill vital wheat gluten for each cup of fresh-ground flour I will add and 1.5 cups of ‘store-bought’ flour, usually a bread flour like King Arthur or Gold Medal. Note: for bread-baking purposes, a cup is by weight, not volume, so one ‘cup’ at my altitude and humidity is about 3/4 of a normal measuring cup.

To this mix I add 3.5 cups of fresh ground flour. I usually mix at least 2 grains for more balanced proteins. Today it was rye and hard white wheat. If I have KAMUT on hand, I will throw some of that in the mix. I experimented with grinding popcorn the other day, so had a quarter of a cup to throw in. Occasionally I ‘ll throw in some buckwheat also, as it also has some differences that improve the nutrition of the loaf, which is the point in doing all this.

I’m currently using a small BACK to BASICS mill, which makes good flour. If you are feeding two, it’s fine. I’ve been looking at a larger mill from Lehmann’s. I had to return the one I bought as there was some odd problem. It could have been operator error, which would embarrass me a lot.

When I have other good dry additives on hand, I will throw some in before I leave the dry bin. My favorites include oat bran, wheat bran or almond meal. Today, it was almond meal, chopped dry ginger and some pecan pieces.

The wet stuff goes right into the zojirushi bread pan. 2 eggs, 3 T olive oil (if I have virgin coconut oil I will substitute 1T of this for 1 of the olive oil), 3T honey, 1.5 t of almond extract, and about 1.25 cups of warm water. I usually put the Pyrex measuring cup of water into the microwave for 30 seconds. This allows me to use the ‘quick’ cycle of the bread machine. That way if I make bread in the evening, I don’t have to wait up for it to come in before I go to bed!

After giving this all a little stir, I add the dry mix on top and add about 2t of RED STAR yeast.

I close the lid, set on quick wheat bread (2 hours and 8 minutes) and let it ROCK AND ROLL. I will check it often in the first 15 minutes. Between the altitude and the low humidity, adjustments are needed to almost every loaf. Sometimes it’s a tablespoon or two of water, other times it is flour. Once it has ‘cleared to floor’ of the bread machine, I leave it alone. By ‘clear the floor’ I mean that the beater bars are not surrounded by a soft dough and the mix has a soft but not too mushy texture.

Before I walk away, I chop some dried fruit. Today I used about half a cup of golden raisins, chopped dried pineapple and dried apricots for a total of a loose cup of fruit. When the zo beeped for additives, I dumped in the fruit and started doing other chores.

The scent of baking bread begins to permeate the house. Is there anything more wonderful? Yes! Enjoying the fruits of your labor!

　

My Simply Perfect Saturday Morning

This morning was just right! I slept a little later than usual. My husband let the big, goofy golden retriever out and made coffee while I dozed. I loved not being awakened by a cold, wet nose in my face, regardless the associated affection! We drank yummy coffee out of my favorite mugs – from the old Sante Fe railroad Mimbreno pattern, a reminder of the days of luxurious dining on exotic rail travels to the mysterious and spiritual southwestern US. (How I love eBay – I can find things that no shop within 500 miles carries without leaving home!) The morning was unusually cool for June in the high desert. We opened the doors and let the cool air envelop us, making the warm coffee even better!

I puttered for a while, mostly reading the paper and folding laundry. Then I tackled the task of the morning: a loaf of bread. I make two types: breakfast bread and regular bread. Breakfast bread has ingredients that constitute the best array of amino acids and beneficial fats and carbs possible without adding meat or engineered chemicals. Today was regular bread, which we consume on occasions other than running off to the office with a hunk of peanut-butter-slathered breakfast bread in tow.

After prepping the zojirushi, I started grinding the grain. I use a small ‘back to basics’ grain mill. It makes adequate flour for bread and doesn’t take up my entire kitchen counter. I buy bulk rye grain locally and 25 lb bags of wheat from survivalacres.com, primarily because their shipping costs are low enough that it brings the cost of white wheat within reason. Grinding a cup of each give about 3 cups of flour and a moderate workout for your biceps and triceps. I toss in a cup of King Arthur unbleached bread flour for texture and break out the Bob’s Red Mill items. A tablespoon of vital wheat gluten per cup of home-ground flour adds protein and helps keep the bread elastic – neither of us are gluten sensitive. Then some oat bran for health. Other dry ingredients include salt and dry milk. The dry milk in the right proportion interacts with the yeast, salt and gluten to keep the yeast’s carbon dioxide bubbles small and uniform.

In the interim, I warm the water and add olive oil (usually Colavita because it is locally available and has a fresh flavor), cold pressed coconut oil (http://www.organicfacts.net/organic-oils/) and Harry’s Hillsboro Honey, a New Mexico organic product that is just delicious and shines through despite being a small part of the process.

All goes into the machine in the prescribed order and I top it with Red Star yeast – not the rapid stuff, but I do add a pinch more to make up for using the quick bread setting on the machine. I set it on ROCK AND ROLL and head off to write this blog entry. Today is cool and dry, so in checking the bread during kneading, it needed another couple of tablespoons of water to make up for the ingredients being unusually dry. Should anyone read this and want the recipes, add a comment requesting them and I'll happily post.

I can already smell the toasty goodness as I head off to shower before visiting friends in the hospital.

Building a better loaf

We eat a lot of bread in this house. When the price of a loaf of 'good' bread shot to $5 in late 2008, I'd had enough of being held hostage. Paying a high price for mystery ingredients had turned me into a crazy woman. OK, maybe I was already there, but this certainly did not help toward any recovery.

I did some research, asked around and consulted consumer reports. I decided on a Zojirushi BBCC-X20, which makes a large horizontal loaf. It does have the wierd paddle holes in the bottom, but you can get accustomed to that if the bread is good enough.

Next problem was actually buying one. Luckily it was near Christmas so they were abundant. Thank goodness for the internet. I did some comparison shopping and found that the price varied wildly for a new one. High was around $250 PLUS shipping down to a low around $200 including shipping. I did the math, even if ingredients and electricity cost me $2.50 a loaf, the machine would pay for itself in 40 weeks. Not bad. I went for it. I found a great deal on eBay from a seller that also has a brick-and-mortar store and 100% satisfaction, so that's where I ordered.

Bread, even if you are not doing the kneading, is still fascinating stuff. How did man ever figure it out? Powdering grain and mixing it with just the right stuff, especially the yeast, to get a light network of nutty goodness -- I couldn't have done it in a lifetime, yet we have inherited the secrets and take them for granted!

We live at 5000+ feet, so even with the bread machine there are subtlties that I NEVER imagined before. I can't dump the stuff in, turn it on and walk away. The humidity here is so low, and varies so much from day to day that you must actually adjust the recipes for the RH. There may be as much difference as a quarter of a cup of water to keep the 'loaf' from becoming a load of small, round, hard dog treats. My big, dumb golden retriever takes great interest in the process, knowing that if I goof, she gets the good stuff!

In making bread, some balance must be learned. The zen of bread making was previously unknown to me, but there is definitely a bread zone to enter! A few times I have put in too much of something I love -- like chopped dried fruit. I quickly learned how fruitcake was discovered when I retrieved a heavy, wet loaf of it from my machine. Another lesson: a cup of flour is not a cup of flour! At my altitude and humidity, a cup of flour, which is about 4.5 ounces, actually measures at 3/4 of a cup. That explained a lot of dog treats! I have come to appreciate what amazing stuff BREAD is and how we take it for granted because it has become such a small part of our bounty in this day and age.

The GOOD stuff is another reason I make my own bread now. Oh, we've jumped in with both feet. Not just buying the good King Arthur flour, which has gone up $2 a bag since the end of 2008, by the way. Same cost-benefit analysis led us to buy a small hand grinder for grain. We now grind our wheat, rye, brown rice -- you get the idea. We use local honey and have graduated to virgin olive and coconut oils rather than just butter or shortening.

We're down to two basic loaves a week, with an occasional third of sourdough just for variety. We also use the sourdough for pizza dough -- yes, Domino's misses us! I'm surprised they haven't sent a 'missing you' card! The first loaf replaces the morning bagels I bought for my husband. I feel really bad about that because the local bagel joint went out of business about 6 months after we bought the bread machine. I did not imagine my bread machine as a business murderer, but I guess it shares the guilt with me and others.

Our daily bread is now high protein, high fiber and really good. I know what is in it and rarely feel guilty eating it, because it is wholesome and healing. We do not scrimp on quality but are not 'breaking the bank' because the price of grain is still less than the price of white flour. Above all else, I am starting to feel the contentment of providing for my family in a different, much more visceral way. Some day soon I will probably stop using the bread machine and just do it all myself, but until then, Zo and I will continue to crank out the good stuff!