My Sister in law has kindly donated the breadmaker which lived in her shed, for me to play with. It is an older model Sunbeam.
I have made bread by hand a few times, and I really enjoyed the meditative part of the kneading, but it was not happening regularly. I had read on the ALS website about people having breadmakers and wondered if I had one, would it get used?
People on the Simple Savings forums have suggested that making your own bread costs about $0.80 cents per loaf, compared with over $3.00 for most loaves of bread. The grainy, heavy ones we like often cost over $4.50.
So I have been experimenting.
Have made two plain white loaves all the way through in the breadmaker, one on a time-delay, just to get the feel of it.
Next task is to practice just taking it to the dough setting, and then finishing the loaf or rolls off in my own oven. The aim of this is to enable me to use the gas oven rather than the electricity of the breadmaker, and to shape the dough into whatever shape I want. My friend Doc has some great recipes for breadmaker bread which uses this technique.
The good thing about this of course is that it is giving us all experience with making bread from scratch, the slow food way. Yes, I am using the machine too, but it is still quite empowering.
It also means that we control what we put into the bread -no preservatives or additives at all.
Hmm -minestrone soup tonight for tea -what about some bread to go with it?
No comments:
Post a Comment