Today, I stopped off at a local yardsale and picked up a bread machine, i’d been kicking the idea around in the back of my mind, but didn’t feel like spending full retail on something I’d most likely use for a couple weeks and then put it in the storage unit…
so, for $10 for a basic “Red Star” bread machine, I figure it’d be worth a chance, the owner was selling it because they upgraded to a machine with more “bells and whistles”
I plugged it in at the site to check basic functionality, it worked, so I decided to take a chance
when I got it home, I gave it a thorough cleaning, and decided to bake my first loaf of bread, and considering my cooking technique is “toss a bunch of stuff in and hope for the best” the result was surprisingly good for a first loaf…
of course, I had to fight Murphy’s Law from the start, as I didn’t have enough flour for a full size loaf, I had just barely enough for a half-size loaf, so I guestimated and scaled back quantities
from what little baking I know, yeast creates CO2 that causes the air pockets in the bread, and considering I like a bread with a lot of air pockets, but a nice solid structure (Italian style breads, crusty but fluffy) I added a little more yeast than normal, also the yeast was old and I wasn’t sure how well it’d work, so I overcompensated…
I decided to start simple with a basic white bread recipie, but make the following changes;
use Rosemary Olive Oil instead of regular oil
use Brown Sugar instead of regular sugar
add rasins at the second mix stage
add a tiny bit more yeast than “neccecary”
dumped it all in, and let the machine churn away…
2 hours and 30 minutes later, I pulled out my first half-loaf of bread, looked decent, good color, nice and crusty, let it rest for 15 minutes and sliced off the first piece, not knowing what to expect…
it was good, REALLY good, far better than I expected, light and fluffy, nice light amber color, great aroma, it was absolutely delicious, I could’ve eaten the whole thing in one sitting…
(i almost did…)
so, with my first success, i stopped off at the grocery store to pick up some premade mixes, i’ve now got a cinnamon rasin resting in the machine, a mix that i’m going to add more rasins to (I like my rasin bread to be a true RASIN bread…)
things I discovered with this new mix;
my first bread i added far too much water to, it had the consistency of cake batter, never balled up, that may explain it’s flattish appearance, it just couldn’t rise due to too much liquid, it still came out delicious and fluffy, probably due to the extra yeasties partying down in the mix
this bread baking stuff is going to be fun…
since the bread mixes are designed for a 1.5-2 pound machine, I can’t use an entire mix per machine, but that gives me other possibilities, such as saving the remainder of the mixes and mixing them all together to make “mystery bread” that’s different every time, the “mystery loaf” will have a mixture of Cinnamon Rasin, Sourdough, Honey Wheat, Itallian Herb, and Hawaiian Royal mixes…
hindsight being 20/20, after I mixed up the Rasin bread that’s processing now, I realized “I should’ve used white grape juice instead of water in the rasin bread…”
the next loaves will probably be beer bread, I picked up a six of Redhook Blonde Ale to cook with, a nice, summery ale, come wintertime, I’ll mix up some solid, hearty Stout based bread
Anything that combines chemistry with technology is fine in my book, this breadmaker is going to be a lot of delicious fun, edible science experiments, what could be better?
any reccomendations for a bread machine novice?
Oh and because I can’t leave a good thing alone, I just added in a bunch of rasins in the second mix cycle, as well as a capful of white grape juice, this baking is sensitive stuff, after the capful of grape juice was added, the mix started to get all runny, so I needed to add in some more of the mix to raise the consistency, looks like baking is less forgiving of “experiments” than I thought…
