After doing some research, I have decided, I do not need or want a bread machine. Yeah. No bread machine. I will be getting rid of the one I already own. No evil or awful reason, but these things are discontinued by manufacturers at an alarming rate, replacement parts are almost never available for machines that aren’t discontinued (and forget finding any for a discontinued model), and bread machine owners have either had serious mechanical problems or problems getting acceptable bread out of these things, or they love them and use them all the time, and it doesn’t seem to matter how expensive or cheap the units, the love and hate are pretty much all on the same points. Either there are a lot of people not even capable of properly using a bread machine or the people who love the things have no clue what bread should taste like. I lean toward believing a lot of people just don’t know what bread should be like with a smattering of people who can’t follow instructions.
And that reading reminding of the reasons I wasn’t all that thrilled when I was using the machine: odd shaped loaves, light crust setting produces too much crust, can’t make wheat bread, a hole in the bottom of your bread from the kneading paddle (how stupid is that). Anyway … bread machine … ME NO WANT!
Phew. One less thing to lust after.
Now that leaves me with the dilemma of not really knowing how to make bread without a bread machine. Oh, I know the process. I think I may have even done it once or twice a long time ago, but ugh … it’s such a freaking process. Oh well. Guess I will be learning how to bake bread in an oven. I better check out loaf pans, seeing as I own not a one. Accurate measuring cups would probably be a smart thing to have too. Pretty sure I can get those things far cheaper than a bread machine that’s going to break or otherwise drive me insane. :)
Gentle Orbbo,
The bread amchine is a device for those that neither know how to cook nor know what bread is. This, surely, can not be you! However, the bread machine has brought the rest of us and especially those of us who love to bake the stuff a few good things.
I agree, when I bought my bread book back in ’92 and began to produce a few doorstops and then an unimaginable number of great loafs, moving evermore towards the primative basic loaf, tehn on to flat breads — yes pretty much in what we would call an Orbbish style — it was a chore. It was a huge production in the kitchen, time consuming, messy and tedious. All that bloody kneeding.
While the pleebs and the yuppies went for machines and, I think, dropped them like a flat loaf if they like bread, the trend did leave us with something: hihgly refined, balanced and leavened bread making flour! The machines are weak, small and not too hot, meaning they couldn’t make bread out of anything that didn’t have the Will To Power to be bread in the first place.
Thus, bread maker flour is the best and easiest for baking and it does make a good loaf in any style. The other thing that helps is an oven that proof the dough for you at 50C.
Here’s my new pizza crust Rx
Large glass mixing bowl & wooden spoon
Breadmakers white and wholewheat
One pack of yeast
1/3 C of Olive Oil
Warm water (35C)
Salt
Pour water onto everything else and stir with a wooden spoon until it lumps into a dough. Stab at it a few times, scrape the sides intothe ball, cover in saran wrap and put in oven at 50C for 1/2 hour.
Spread flour or cornmeal on a pizza stone or baking sheet, dump the dough onto it and roill it out into a pizza, pucker the edges and add a whack of good toppings, cook in a hot oven 200C for 30 to 35 minutes.
Roll the leftover dough into giant breadsticks for Foibles (or yourselves, for crutons or dipping in Olive Oil and Balsamic or Ducaugh), toss them on an oven rack, out with the pizza.
Did you notice? No kneeding! This version of the flour doesn’t need it. For a loaf, I still like to slap it around and kneed it a bit, but less than five minutes, no breaking a sweat.
If your wing is weak, get a spurtal. A Scotish invention for stiring oats. A long wooden stick, 1.5″ in diameter, round with a bulbous end (yeah, kinda looks like one), but it fits your hand better for gripping and transfers more power to mixing than to turning.
Your mission Orb, if you decide to accecpt it, is to discover if the breadmakers of Austin (the people not the machines) have a community bread oven, usually a large woodfired affair outside in a middle-eastern, Greek or Italian neighbourhood and take your dough there. Hope that your dough flops when you do, because you will then meet good breadmaking friends and you will be hooked, just like knitting!
We just happened into having a breadmaker. It was a gift. I don’t think I would have bought one for myself. I used it mostly to make dessert breads, which being more moist turned out pretty good in it. The regular bread it made always seemed lacking somehow, though it did make the apartment smell nice. :D
I definitely want to make pizza dough and pizzas. Thanks for the recipe!
I’m probably going to give bread a go next week sometime. I’m going to have to lock the furry monsters away while I do it, because I am fairly certain I will end up needing all available flat space in the kitchen, and I am certain the kittens would love to be in the middle of dough making. It just sounds so complicated and tedious and messy … and prone to failure at the beginning. Though who knows, I may have a knack for it! The ingredients are cheap, so why not just go for it. If nothing else, it will give Lin something new to tease me about when I produce a few rock-like lumps. :lol:
Austin is just hippy-yippy enough, I bet there is a co-op oven around somewhere. I’ll have to do some digging!