Fear Not the Yeast

From reading various food blogs and the comments on posts about bread, it seems many people almost fear yeast.  If not fear, then it is looked  upon as some sort of dark magic not to be messed with.  Yeast is our friend in many ways.  Wild yeast fermentation gives us sour kraut and kim chi.  Other yeast varieties give us beers and wines.  Then there's baker's yeast.  Yeast coupled with gluten gives bread lift and depending on the length of the rise adds some wonderful flavors.  This brings us to the where we are now.

We don't eat bread with meals very often at our house.  Matter of fact, most weeks the only bread I eat is toast for breakfast on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  The good wife will eat some home made Cranberry Walnut Cinnamon bread with a nut butter spread on it.  However, there are some meals that seem to require bread, or at least are better with bread.

The Seafood Stew of Necessity from a previous post is one such meal.  I just didn't think about it in time.  After all, bread does take some time.  So, when we ate the leftovers I made sure to have bread.  I made a nice little French Bread loaf.

I'll add this now, you can find some excellent recipes, usually on someone's blog, as a pin on Pinterest.  Yes,  that is where I found this recipe.

I have several bread recipes in my Tested Recipes board on Pinterest that are very tasty.  I was going to use one of those but I saw one that said it was simple so I opened it up to check it out.  The time requirement for this recipe is the same but you let your stand mixer do the work for you.  Here is the link to the recipe, http://www.thebakerupstairs.com/2012/09/french-bread.html.

After I got the KitchenAid set up I ran into a problem.  I didn't have enough yeast on hand.  I actually had half the called for amount.  The good wife says, "can you make a half recipe?"  Yep, all the measurements are easily cut in half so away I went.



After the rise ready for the egg wash.

According to the recipe, once you have the dough together, you turn off the machine and let it rest for 10 minutes.  After that rest, you use the dough hook on your mixer to knead it for 10 seconds.  You repeat that process 5 times.  After that, you roll it into your loaf shape and let it rise for 30 minutes.  Don't forget to cut slits in the top.  After the rise, brush the top with an egg wash and bake it for 30 minutes and you're done.

Fresh from the oven.

Now, does this bread have the depth of flavor that others do?  No.  Does it taste better than what you'd pick up at the store?  Yes.  It turned out with a nice light crumb and good mouth feel and a good flavor.  It was very good with some good butter on it and was a great accompaniment to the stew.

Bring on the butter.

If you don't have a stand mixer, you can do it by hand.  I only got the KitchenAid fairly recently so doing it by hand is no big deal.  Give this one a try sometime.  I think you'll like it.



Uncle T