Bread

Mission largely accomplished!

Curly kneading the dough:


StinkyMan punching the dough:


The finished product (sorry for the no-flash blur):




We hit a few snags along the way. The first thing was that we were short about a cup of flour, so my friend Michelle saved the day by reconfiguring the recipe for me. (Thank you!) We dissolved the yeast in the warm water and the kids thought that was really cool. The dough kneading was by far their favorite part.



Their least favorite part? Waiting for the dough to rise, which is where we hit snag #2. In that it didn't. The house was a bit too chilly. So we had to heat a mug of water in the microwave and then put the bowl in the microwave w/ the hot water mug for an hour to let it rise. It worked! So we punched it down, made 2 loaves and put them in the loaf pans to rise again.



Here is where we hit snag #3. Because we took an extra hour to get the dough to rise, I had to leave 30 minutes in to take BabyGirl to the pediatrician and the dough needed at least another hour. And while Grampy is getting really good at watching the kids, bread baking is not on his resume. Having no choice, I told him to throw it in the oven at 350 in about a half an hour for around 40 minutes. Somewhere in there he was supposed to punch it back down, but I didn't give that instruction. It would have been Grandpa overload.



When I came back the bread was just finishing baking. Snag #4? Grampy wasn't sure how long it had been in there. Oops. But it smelled heavenly for sure. When I took the loaves out and gave everyone a hot piece with butter the general consensus was that, while yummy, it wasn't quite done, so we threw loaf #2 back in for about 12 more minutes.



Originally I thought snag #5 would be that the loaf was not, well, normal loaf size, as you can see in the picture above. BUT I have decided that is not a snag as it is the perfect size for kid sandwiches. And it tastes really, really good. Perhaps the missing round of punching the dough down would have changed the size of the loaves, or maybe even the taste, but we liked it this way very much.



So let's see if our multi level experiment has been completed:

step 1: actually making the ingredients into a successful dough. Quite possibly the biggest hurdle CHECK!

step 2: actually making/baking the dough into good tasting bread CHECK!

step 3: actually getting my kids to eat it in place of the store bought stuff. CHECK!

step 4: if steps 1-3 are successful, convincing myself to get up off my lazy rear end and make this bread on a regular basis. Ummmmm........

I'm going to try to make another batch without the kids to get a real sense of how easy it actually is or isn't now that I have the steps down. But I liked it. I'll have to price it all out and see how much it really saves me and see if that dollar amount is worth my time. But for now I'd say the experiment was mostly successful. The last step is solely up to me.