+of+copy+3+ayib.JPG "The Year is over, but we're still baking!")
We're Back To Baking At A Year in Bread: Scrumptious Homemade Sandwich Loaves!
Now up! My New Honey Bran Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread Recipe
We're a very bread oriented household here on the farm, and we take our sandwiches seriously. I took it as a compliment when a houseguest once said, after polishing off one of the homegrown lamb salami sandwiches I'd packed for us to eat while out running errands (I never leave the farm without food), "I'm so full. Your sandwiches are like a meal!" but at the same time part of me was thinking, Well, yeah. It was lunch.
A sandwich shouldn't be something you're forced to eat—it should be something you want to eat. And it doesn't have to be expensive or fancy to be fabulous. Start with nice ingredients and you'll end up with a very nice sandwich. Plain old peanut butter and jam? A perennial favorite around here. But the bread is freshly baked, the peanut butter and jam (reduced sugar—you can taste the fruit!) are organic, and the mandatory ice cold glass of milk served alongside came straight out of a happy Jersey cow who lives six miles down the road.
Crusty, freeform artisan breads are popping up almost everywhere these days, but the sandwich bread section at most supermarkets still remains a disappointing (and sometimes frightening) place. How can ingredients with 22 letters belong in a loaf of bread? And why is Oroweat not spelled Orowheat? Is it like creme and cheez, which don't contain cream or cheese?
The sandwich solution? Set aside a few hours each week or two and bake your own loaves. It's easier than you think, tastier than you can imagine, and costs less than the storebought equivalent—that is if you could actually find a storebought equivalent.
So dive right in and make my Honey Bran Whole Wheat Bread which is pictured above and now up on A Year in Bread (it makes fantastic toast), or go a little easier on yourself and try my super popular Farmhouse White first—it's a great loaf for beginners. And don't miss all the other sandwich bread recipes we've shared so far on A Year in Bread. To see what else we've been baking up over there, you can meander through the monthly archives (links in the left sidebar) or scroll down in this post and you'll find links to our first 14 recipes.
Still have some flour left? Here are more bread recipes:
Beyond Easy Beer Bread (my most popular recipe)
Whole Wheat Beer Bread
Onion Rye Beer Bread
Easy Rosemary Focaccia
Savory Feta Cheese & Scallion Scones
Cranberry Christmas Scones
White Whole Wheat Scones with Currants & Oats
Parisian Four Hour Daily Baguettes (I love these!)
Italian Rosemary Raisin Bread (try it toasted with cheddar & apricot jam)
No-Knead Crusty Freeform Bread
Oatmeal Toasting Bread (makes great rolls, too)
Fresh Tomato & Basil Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread
Italian Black Olive Cheeks
Carrot Herb Rolls (And A Bargain Bread Book For Beginners)
Three Onion & Three Cheese Pizza
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where the official 'year' of our joint blogging project, A Year in Bread, is over, but Beth and I have plenty of fun, flour-dusted ideas for the site—they've just been slightly waylaid since she fell and shattered her wrist two months ago. So no kneading or blogging (or doing much of anything) for her for a while, though at least she'd just finished her new book! Too bad she can't autograph copies yet.
Labels: A Year In Bread, bread baking
posted by Farmgirl Susan at 7:21 PM
31 Comments:
Do you have a trick for getting relatively thin, relatively uniform slices without squishing the bread? That's always a problem for me!
Mmm... nothing beats homemade bread. I'm looking forward to trying this recipe. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much!! This is great information and reallhy makes me want to eat a sandwich.
Hooray for bread! I have been experimenting with Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible, and I've found a great sandwich loaf there. There's a lot of down time with bread, but not too much active work. It's a good project for a day when you're going to be home, even if you have other things to do while it rises and rests and does the things that bread needs to do.
Of course, one of the nice things about living in the desert is that when the house is a cool 70 without heat or AC at this time of the year, I can still but my bread outside to rise, as it's been flirting with 80 degrees during the day! :)
Thanks for the great new recipe - I will have to try it! I fully agree about making your own bread - others seem to think it takes so much time but I love baking a couple loaves on a weekend to last a week or two. Always better than store-bought!
What gorgeous loaves! Perfect!
Cheers,
Rosa
Oh my. I want to just dive into these loaves. They look simply perfect! And yeeep, nothing beats homemade loaves of bread. Fortunately for me, I have a cousin who is a professional chef/baker and insists on stocking our kitchen with freshly-baked pastries and breads every weekend. So yes, we're spoiled... in the best way possible. ;)
Yum! This looks great. I love what you've been doing over at A Year In Bread. It's inspired me to branch out into bread again. Can you keep the dough in the freezer or fridge for any duration prior to the second rise and baking?
My testimonial to Susan's bread is her fabulous Farmhouse White!! My brother has made it many, many times (and he readily admits that he is a novice) and it turns out so good!! (One of these days, I'm going to give it a try myself.)
I'm a huge homemade bread fan and this bread is truly special!!
Thanks again, Susan, for sharing this and all your other recipes with us (not to mention your farm life and all your animals, etc. etc. etc.)
I am so thankful I came across your blog. I have been looking for some homemade bread recipes!
I just wanted to say Hello! I just discovered your blog and cannot wait to try out your recipes. Your pictures are good enought to eat!
I was raised on homemade bread, my folks would make it together every Sunday morning. Nothing in the world beats a house that is filled with the smell of fresh baking bread. Now I make it weekly for my family. I'll have to give some of your recipes a try, thank! Kim
Great shots of bread!
What got me baking bread was Ed Brown's Tassajara Bread Book. Well, that and Laurel's Kitchen. They were such inspiring reads.
Mmmmmm! Oh, man, now I'm hungry! :-) Thanks for the bread post, and for the suggestion of baking your own bread every week or so. I have a question, though: how do you keep your bread from molding/spoiling before its time? Here in humid Georgia, it's nearly impossible. I guess I could keep it in the fridge...but 1) I don't want the bread to smell like my funky leftovers, and 2) I can't find a container big enough for it. Any suggestions?
I can't wait to try this! I just made your carrot herb rolls with carrots, parsley, rosemary and thyme from my garden in Western NY. The timing couldn't have been better since it's all covered in snow now. But seriously, I took my two year old out of the house just so I could bring him back in to fully appreciate the smell of the rolls baking in the oven. Ahh the memories...Thank you for all your posts.
Oh man, I really want to. I swear! Maybe while I'm off for the holidays. Bubba loves homebaked bread so much, but I haven't made any in a long time.
The rolls I made last weekend were a little lacking in the fluffy and light category, so I definitely need a tried and true recipe like this.
Elsewise we end up playing hockey in the dining room instead of enjoying our dinner. Fun times.
I love homemade bread. I don't think I can think of anything better!
Oh that bread looks delicious and fresh! I won't tell you what happened the one and only time I tried to make bread. :)
I'm going to get froggy over Christmas break and try this out - it sounds heavenly. One quick question...when adding flour to keep the dough from sticking is there a preference as to which flour you use (since there are so many different ones in this recipe)?
I hope your weekend is a good one!
That looks incredible! I'm going to have to break down and buy a loaf pan, methinks. Thank you, thank you - all the things I love best....
Nice looking bread!
Ooooh, can't wait to try your bread recipe(s)!!! Bread baking is uppermost in my mind these days :)
Your breads always have such eye appeal - I can almost taste that yeasty goodness. Glad you and KitchenMage are back in action (well you more than her)
Ages ago when my husband was in college and we had 3 little ones about the house I baked bread twice a week as a cost saving measure. I always felt bad that my husband took a Peanut butter and jelly sandwich to school each day on the Honey Wheat Bread that I made... but he has always said that it was more like having desert each day it was soooo good.
I still have in the back of my mind learning to bake bread: really bake it, that is. I use my breadmachine now, and that's kind of cheating. :(
Beautiful looking loaves!
One word, perfection!! Those loafs are just amazing, too beautiful to even cut!!
You always have such pretty bread pictures!
Hi Everybody,
Thanks for all the great comments. It's wonderful to hear so much enthusiasm about homemade bread!
My apologies for taking so long to get to your questions.
Cindy,
Thin, uniform slices are definitely not my strong point. In fact, Joe gets a lot of laughs at the slices of sandwich bread I cut since they're almost always uneven. Even I'm amazed that after all these years (and hundreds of loaves of bread) I still suck when it comes to slicing.
The joke around here is that I should take the large commercial bread slicer we're going to be using for the bread bakery we're building and set it up in the kitchen so I won't have to slice bread by hand anymore.
That said, I do recommend using a large, sharp serrated knife when slicing. This makes a big difference. Freshly baked loaves will always be softer and harder to slice, especially thin, but of course they taste so good it's worth messing up the loaf. : )
One thing I've found is that it is much easier to thinly slice a semi-frozen loaf of bread. (Depending on your knife and strength, as well as the type of bread, it can also be easy to slice a fully frozen loaf.) So what you could do is freeze your bread for a couple of hours, take it back out, and then slice it all up at once.
You can then either store the sliced loaf on the counter, or put it back in the freezer. I usually freeze my loaves unsliced, but I know a lot of people like to be able to grab just one or two slices at a time. If you wrap the slices tightly together they should freeze pretty well.
Phoo-D,
This is a great question that really deserves a whole post to itself - and is exactly the sort of thing Beth and I are planning to cover over at AYearInBread.com as soon as her arm heals and she's back to typing again.
In the meantime, let me at least give you a brief answer (before I have to get back to my rising bread dough - yet another new sandwich loaf!).
Yes, you can refrigerate or even freeze bread dough after letting it rise the first time (called fermenting) and before letting it rise the second time (proofing). You may have seen frozen balls of pizza dough or even bread dough for sale in places.
Once your dough has risen the first time, punch it down and knead it a few times. You can then put it in a container or plastic bag and refrigerate or freeze it before shaping. Be sure to leave some space for the dough to expand since it will start to rise before freezing.
Frozen bread dough needs to defrost at room temperature for several hours before it can be shaped into loaves or rolls and then proofed.
Or you can go ahead and shape your loaves after the first rise, put them in the pans, and then put the pans in the refrigerator. The dough will continue to rise (proof) but very slowly because of the cool temperature. A lot of times you can put your loaves in the fridge in the evening, let them rise all night, then take them out and bake them the next morning.
The thing you have to remember, though, is that the warmer the dough is to start, the more it will rise while cooling down to fridge temperature (usually just under 40 degrees F). The dough will also not stop rising even when it has cooled completely, so you'll want to check and see how it's doing after several hours.
Sometimes you plan to bake bread and then something comes up and you're forced to put things on hold, and a slow proof in the fridge is a great option. But if you know ahead of time you're going to do it, then what a lot of bakers will do is drastically cut the amount of yeast in their recipe - which will slow the rising time way down.
Beth does this a lot, and she'll sometimes use as little as 1/2 or even 1/4 teaspoon of yeast for a couple of loaves of bread. This allows her to let the dough rise in the fridge for much longer, like a day or even two. You can also cut the amount of yeast down and let the dough rise more slowly on the counter - this will give you a tastier loaf with a nicer crumb. A general rule of thumb is to halve the yeast and double the rising time, but you can experiment and see what works for you.
Hope this helps. Happy baking! : )
Hi Miss Kitty,
Ah yes, keeping fresh bread from getting moldy in the summer time is a problem for us, too. In general, I don't like to put my bread in the fridge because I don't like how it changes the texture (and I don't care for cold bread), but if the bread is already a day or two old and I know I'm going to be toasting it, I don't really notice any change after being in the fridge.
I usually store mine in a large ( 2 or 3 gallon) zipper freezer bag, which is thicker than a regular zipper bag and helps keep the bread from absorbing food odors from the fridge. These bags are great because they'll even hold my huge, 2+ pound sandwich loaves. They aren't always easy to find, so I usually stock up and buy a couple of boxes when I do find them. And they can be rinsed out and reused over and over. They're also great for storing all sorts of other stuff, from big bags of chips to even sweaters!
Another option is to store your bread in the freezer. I usually bake 3 loaves at a time and 2 go right into the freezer (in zipper freezer bags) as soon as they're cool. And as mentioned above, you can pre-slice them if you want to just grab one or two slices at a time. Let the defrost at room temperature (doesn't take long) or pop them straight into the toaster or toaster oven frozen.
Hi Anne,
That's another good question. When I'm adding a little more flour to the dough while kneading (to keep it from sticking to my hands and/or the counter) I usually use white flour. It's often finer and is easier to sprinkle just a small amount, but it also won't make the dough heavier like whole grain flour would. It probably won't make a big difference in a recipe like this that doesn't have a huge amount of whole wheat flour to begin with and so is a lighter dough, but sometimes you might find yourself adding 1/2 cup (or even more) extra flour to the dough, and if it's whole wheat that will probably make a detectable difference. That said, the best thing to do is experiment and see what works for you - or simply grab whatever flour is handiest! : )
Happy baking everyone!
There's a bread machine sitting under the tree for me, I'm so excited - I'll be back for recipes on Boxing Day.
What a great blog! I'm so excited. This past year I have been educating myself on making my own bread (focaccia, sandwich bread, baguettes, pizza dough, etc...). Thanks so much for the comment on refrigeration before/during proofing. This helps a ton with my busy schedule with a toddler!
Post a Comment
<< Home