Cooking

This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. This post has been a while coming, but my sister in law was interested in the sourdough loaf last night, so I figured I should finally document my process. First off you need to have a sourdough starter, which I wrote up in a previous post. I am sure less cheaty ways will work too, but the cheating was where it was at for me. Then, you basically follow the process I use for my super simple non-breadmaker loaf, but tweaked a little to use the starter. For the loaf itself: 2 cups of bakers flour (not plain white flour) 1 tea spoon of salt 2 cups of the sourdough starter 1 cup water Similarly to the super simple loaf, you want the dough to be a bit tacky when mixed -- it gets runnier as the yeast does its thing, so it will be too runny if it doesn't start out tacky. I then just leave it on the kitchen bench under a cover for the day. In the evening its baked like the super simple loaf -- heat a…

This is the third in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. I'd like to imagine I was running science experiments in making bread on my kids, but really all I was trying to do was eat some toast. I'm not sure what it was like in other parts of the world, but during the COVID-19 pandemic Australia suffered a bunch of shortages -- toilet paper, flour, and yeast were among those things stores simply didn't have any stock of. Luckily we'd only just done a costco shop so were ok for toilet paper and flour, but we were definitely getting low on yeast. The obvious answer is a sour dough starter, but I'd never done that thing before. In the end my answer was to cheat and use this recipe. However, I found the instructions unclear, so here's what I ended up doing: Starting off 2 cups of warm water 2 teaspoons of dry yeast 2 cups of bakers flour Mix these three items together in a plastic container with enough space for the mix to double in size. Place in a warm place (on the bench on top of the dish…

This is the second in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. Yes I know all the cool kids made bread for themselves during the shutdown, but I did it too! So here we were, in the middle of a pandemic which closed bakeries and cancelled almost all of my non-work activities. I found this animated GIF on Reddit for a super simple no-kneed bread and decided to give it a go. It turns out that a few things are true: animated GIFs are a super terrible way store recipes that animated GIF was a export of this YouTube video which originally accompanied this blog post and that I only learned these things while to trying and work out who to credit for this recipe The basic recipe is really easy -- chuck the following into a big bowl, stir, and then cover with a plate. Leave resting a warm place for a long time (three or four hours), then turn out onto a floured bench. Fold into a ball with flour, and then bake. You can see a more detailed version in the YouTube video above. 3 cups of bakers flour (not…

My dad asked me to document some of my baking experiments from the recent natural disasters, which I wanted to do anyway so that I could remember the recipes. Its taken me a while to get around to though, because animated GIFs on reddit are a terrible medium for recipe storage, and because I've been distracted with other shiney objects. That said, let's start with the basics -- a breadmaker bread that my kids will actually eat. This recipe took a bunch of iterations to get right over the last year or so, but I'll spare you the long boring details. However, I suspect part of the problem is that the receipe varies by bread maker. Oh, and the salt is really important -- don't skip the salt! Wet ingredients (add first) 1.5 cups of warm water (we have an instantaneous gas hot water system, so I pick 42 degrees) 0.25 cups of oil (I use bran oil) Dry ingredients (add second) I just kind of chuck these in, although I tend to put the non-flour ingredients in a corner together for reasons that I can't explain. 3.5 cups of bakers flour (must be bakers flour, not plain flour) 2…