The Evolution of Bread

     The evolution of bread.... (riveting I know...) Did anyone else ever make bread and buns with their grandma when they were little? I did. I remember standing on a stool in her kitchen and helping her. I remember how she cleverly  made me "tuck" the dough in for a nap when it needed to rise, only to turn around and tell me that I needed a nap as well and could get up when the dough's nap was over. (smart woman!) I remember how much fun it was to punch the dough down after it had risen up. I remember watching it rise up in the oven window, anticipating the warm, soft, pillow-like buns spread with butter and home-made strawberry jam.... suddenly I am very hungry... 

     Flash forward about 25 years and you find me, in my kitchen, attempting to recreate the soft, pillow-like mounds of heaven from my childhood. What I inevitably end up with are hockey pucks.... 

     Does this sound familiar to anyone else? You mix the ingredients and leave it to rise, only to come back and see that it hasn't really risen..... so you leave it a while longer... and after 2 and a half hours you give up and realize that it isn't going to rise up like the dough from your childhood. It's not soft and yielding when you go to punch it down and knead it. You shape it and put it in the pans, thinking "Surely this will rise up more during its second rise..." Then your husband walks in and asks you to stop calling him Shirley... You come back and see that the bread is exactly. the. same. size.... you put it in the oven hoping against hope that some magical science will happen with the heat of the oven and you will make your grandmother proud.... only to be faced with a very dense hockey puck when all is said and done.... Do these things happen to anyone else?

     While I am still far from the soft, beautiful bread that my grandmother made (to be fair, she used white sugar and white flour!) I have come a long way in the last 4 months or so. When I started this journey I saw that one thing I really needed to do was start making my own bread. Not only for the health reasons but for the cost reasons as well. You can get gorgeous bread at the farmer's market on Saturdays that has absolutely nothing bad in it, but, you also pay at least 4$ a loaf for it. Compared to how cheap it is to make your own, this has become a no-brainer when you are trying to eat well on a budget. Thus I give you the Stewart's evolution of bread:

My first attempt at bread I didn't even take a picture of, I was too disheartened. I got some new yeast hoping that would help, and made the loaf on the left. Not a hockey puck, but close. After some reading on the Google I tried adding some Vital Wheat Gluten, which is apparently a must when you are using Whole Wheat Flour. This resulted in the loaf on the right, a little bit better, but not quite there yet....

So I decided to try a new recipe.... You know when you read a recipe and you think to yourself "I think they left a step out..." but you are too insecure to really question it and end up following it exactly only to be horribly disappointed? Does this happen to anyone else? The recipe made no mention of greasing the baking pan.... so against my better judgment I didn't. As you can see the silicone one was fine, but the one baked in the traditional pan didn't fair so well.... I hate it when recipes leave steps out! 

And then, a miracle happened.... I got a breadmaker!!!! I know I probably sound lame but this was seriously a game changer for me. I literally dump the ingredients in and then walk away. I know this is not nearly as romantic as how I made bread when I was little, but to be fair I wasn't pregnant with a crying toddler clinging to my legs with a sky-high pile of laundry to do and dirty floors needing to be washed. 

I. Love. This. Thing.

     Another thing that has really helped the quality of our bread was me finding that I could get Stone-Ground Whole Wheat Bread Flour at Bulk Barn. That coupled with the addition of Vital Wheat Gluten has been key in having more "normal" looking bread instead of hockey pucks. We can at least have normal sized sandwiches now. And that my dears, is the riveting tale of bread evolution in the Stewart household :)