INTRODUCTION:
Hello, and welcome to One Stoplight Banking. For a long while, I've been interested in baking. and decided this summer to actually get good at it. This blog is where you can find my musings on baking, biking, and living in a small (but beautiful!) town in southwest Washington, as well as important things that I find or wish to discuss.
Don't expect me to have fancy breads for a while yet. Before I move on to anything fancy, I'll be working on mastering the techniques of baking bread. Getting the rise right, proofing, and shaping. Once I have those down, I'll start experimenting with different kinds of bread, working towards making Challah. At the moment, I'm making simple white bread. This blog will, for the most part, be fairly boring. I'll be posting every time I make a loaf of bread, and if I can get my camera working posting pictures of it throughout the process, and of course the finished product.
BAKING HISTORY:
My mother got me started on baking from a young age, mostly cookies and cake. Over time I worked up into more complex baked goods, such as pies. However, for a long time my experience with baking bread was limited to a bread machine. It stayed at this level for a long time, until my aunt got me a book on baking bread for my birthday. Ever since then, circumstances beyond my control have prevented me from exploiting the book to it's fullest. This summer, I've decided to change that.
In the past month, I've made on the order of 15 loafs of bread. Of them, I consider 3 failures. Two were failures in actually cooking, only one was a failure of the dough. My failure with dough was over rising it. While it is still edible and in fact can taste quite good, it gives the bread a very strong yeasty, almost alcoholic, sent and taste. Both of my baking errors were under cooking the middle of it.
Today's loaf is a simple one, although perhaps with a tad to much fluid. I'll see if I can get some pictures of the bread after it cooks, and edit them in.
EDIT: Bread finished, quite tasty. Finally happy with my crusts, now need to work on the crumb (the part you actually eat) Here we have some pictures of it.
From the top.
From the side.
And a view of the interior (crumb) of the bread.Thanks for reading!
