Curmudgeonly Cooking: Bread VIII: Tips

Some tips about cooking:

• A grain mill to grind wheat into flour seems weird but if you can hack the price it’ll make your food taste better.
• It takes X minutes to prepare a four loaf / four pound dough batch. It takes much less than 2X to prepare two batches. I make eight loaves at a time and it’s only a little more work. Get what I’m hinting at?
• If you are really careful about cleaning you’ll get it done in a fraction of the time a less organized person would take.
• Leave the kitchen in better shape than you found it. Just do it.
• You don’t need many ingredients or utensils but keep them segregated from the general kitchen population or you’ll waste time looking for things.
• If one batch of bread dough sits around an extra half hour because the oven is full with a different batch, it doesn’t seem to matter.
• According to the book, the bread dough can sit in the fridge for several days. I haven’t tested it. I make dough one day, bake it the next, and forget it the rest of the week.

Tips about the bread:

• Your bread will have the size and shape of an actual loaf of bread. This is how bread has looked for thousands of years. Naturally it’s alien to folks who think “Wonderbread” is “tasty”. Get used to weird looks when your peanut butter sandwich is narrow.
• Store excess bread in the freezer. Stuff a loaf in a plastic bag and jam it in the freezer as soon as it’s cool (not earlier). It seems to taste perfect when thawed out.
• Don’t try to cut a frozen loaf…let it thaw. Don’t ask how I know this.
• This bread will go stale faster than the crap you buy at a store. After about the third day it’s time to throw it to the chickens. (Frozen bread excepted.)

Last few notes:

• Bread made this way is rediculosly cheap. Every loaf you or your family consumes is money in the bank.
• I’m not a doctor but I’m convinced this is just about the healthiest food this side of things I shoot with a rifle.
• If low carb diet nuts give you crap about this bread give ‘em a good smack. Yes, it’s carbs but it is pretty much all simple stuff and in a world full of Doritos and PopRocks nobody should get crap about homemade wheat bread.
• If any hippies visit your house tell them the bread was bought at great expense from Laotian Monks. They’ll never believe you made it yourself.