My 2009 Cooking Goal: Yeast Breads

When it comes to cooking, there is cooking and then there is baking. They are not the same. Cooking is usually pretty simple - assemble ingredients, heat it somehow and eat. Baking is different. I'm learning that there are several factors involved in baking that make it much easier to mess up! A couple of years ago I made it my goal to learn how to make biscuits from scratch - several batches of tough, mealy, flat biscuits later, I feel pretty confident in my biscuit baking. But yeast breads...ack! Therein lies a monster I was not ready to face...

Until now!

My 2009 cooking goal has been (and continues to be) to teach myself how to make yeast breads that are edible.

I've been working on two different kinds so far - a basic sandwich loaf and dinner rolls - particularly my Nanny's beloved recipe. Here are some things I've learned (mostly from watching Good Eats and reading Alton Brown's book on baking):

1. Use instant rise yeast. Rapid rise is the old fashioned kind. Instant rise is similar to rapid rise except it rises better because more of the yeast is alive. Another plus of instant rise yeast is that you don't have to use warm water, which for me was always trouble because I tended to make the water too hot...which kills the yeast.

2. Start the dough off by adding 1 cup of flour to the rest of the ingredients, mix well and then let the dough rest about 20 minutes before you add enough flour to make it the right consistancy. What's right??? ha! As if that could be put into words! But the "rest" - I noticed during my biscuit trials that if I let the biscuit dough rest while I prep-ed the pan and got my rolling area ready, the dough was less sticky and easier to pat out. The same thing here, the flour needs to absorb some of the liquid and it needs a few minutes to sort all that out.

3. Use bottled or filtered water, city water has stuff in it to kill little critters - yeast can be killed by city water too. **This has made the biggest difference for me**

4. Make a mini hot kitchen to rise the dough in - I suspect that Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't have trouble finding a warm place to let her bread dough rise, but my a/c filled kitchen isn't uncomfortably warm, so I put a pan of near boiling water on the bottom rack of my oven, then put the dough ball in a greased bowl on the top rack, cover the bowl and close the door.

5.Temp the baked bread:

Yes I'm using a meat thermometer. The idea is that you want to bake the bread to right at 205-210 degrees. 212 is where water evaporates and that makes your bread dry.

So far that's all I've got! I still really need to work on this skill. I'm not ready to bake a bunch of bread as gift loaves for friends! I'd like to work on making french bread too. But I'm making peace with yeast and I am happy with my improvement thus far.