Healthy bread in 5 minutes a day
The breadmachine is seeing little to no use in our house, but we are breaking a shitload of bread. How? I discovered the five minutes a day bread making method, and it’s a winner! I first read of it on a blog called The Italian Dish, who posted up a nice step-by-step guide on how to make your own no-knead bread. That type of bread required a baking stone to make, but I found another method on Mark Bitman’s blog using a cast iron pan of the type that I have in my kitchen. Whey-hey.
I made that bread for a while, and tried to make a whole wheat version by um… putting some whole wheat flour in (I’m a serious pro, people). That… well, actually that still turned out pretty good as well. We made breadbuns with oats, and generally enjoyed the hell out of the recipe.
So in a dramatic break with my food blog tradition, I bought a cookbook from the people who’d thought of the whole thing: Healthy breads in five minutes a day: a book all about whole wheat and other healthy breads (and some weird gluten-free ones, but i’ll feel no qualms about skipping those).
I can’t wait to see what this book can do!
The master recipe
The master recipe is a little different than the ones I used before. Mostly the amounts are slightly different, but there’s also a new ingredient: Vital wheat gluten. Apparently whole wheat flour doesn’t have as much gluten as white flour and so you need to put some gluten back in (a scientist is me!) so it’ll rise better. Our whole wheat breads seemed to rise fine, they were a bit dense but that’s just homemade bread, no? It took a bit of searching, but I found a pack at Origino.
The first batch of the master recipe turned out too wet. There’s two things to try to alleviate this problem:
- Add more flour next time (duh)
- Get a bigger tupperware box for the dough to rise in. In the box we have now it’s nearly overflowing and that’s probably stopping the dough from fermenting to its full potential.
Okay, I’m back with a 9 litre tupperware box. That ought to do it. Seriously, you could hide a body in this box. Well, not really, but only because it’s transparant.
I’m making a full batch (I usually halve it) and am decreasing the water by half a cup. Here we go!
…
Rising nicely so far. See what you do is throw all the flour, yeast and water together, give it a quick stir to break up all flour clumps, and then least the yeast do its thing. The first few hours it has to rise on room temperature. The yeast gets bubbly and just soaks up all the air it can get and becomes a huge ass yeast monster.
After that it goes into the fridge over night to um.. do other important yeasty stuff.
….
Well, my batch is a bust. The dough won’t rise an inch. Unfortunately, I was so confident the bigger box and less water would do it, that I made a full batch. Meaning we have enough dough for at least three more breads. Shucks! My old recipe worked fine and now I bought a book and have made nothing but bad (tasty, but dense and ill-rising) bread ever since. What do do now?
- Get a different brand of whole wheat flour.
I’ve been using WW bread flour so far, and that shouldn’t matter because the only thing that matters is the protein content and that one is fine… but I might as well give it ago. It’s that or go back to my old recipe and throw this book in the trash!
….
Next attempt (with the old dough of doom): I’ve let the bread sit 15 minutes longer, it was still coldish to the touch but a bit less so (apparantly our fridge is too cold…). I’ve put a thermometer in the oven to make sure it was the right temperature (ish). Let’s see how it goes.
…
It’s risen a bit, but still nothing like the rise of my old half-whole wheat bread… Don’t look much better than yesterday’s, really.
