Adventures in Breadmaking

For my birthday, I was given an awesome book by my family that taught me something. I knew next to nothing about making bread.  The book is Fundamental Techniques of Classic Bread Baking and is helping me make some incredible new thing like ciabatta bread, pretzels, and some pretty tasty new pizza dough. I'm learning all about pre-fermentation and other cooking techniques that I had no clue about. On the horizon I have bagels, baguettes, and all sorts of other wonderful breads on my list of yummy stuff to make.

Crock Pot Bread

I saw an article on how to make crockpot bread the other day and so I decided to try it. I took pieces from a couple different articles to come up with how I was gonna make my bread. I've linked to the originals below. Here is what I did:

Ingredients:

1 pouch yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups warm water
3 cups flour

Directions:

Mix water an yeast in a mixing bowl or stand mixer. Add salt, mix. Add flour 1 cup at a time until all is blended. Add a little more flour as you knead the dough or use a dough hook to knead the dough. Once you have a nice dough ball, dust it lightly with flour.

Line the crockpot with a piece of parchment paper and place the dough ball in the center, there is no need to let it rise.

Cook on high for 2 hours (or until internal temp is 190-200). Remove from crockpot and place loaf on a cookie sheet and place in oven for about 5 minutes on med-high broil setting to brown the top a little. Keep a close eye, you don't want to burn it!

Thats it. Seriously. It tastes good too. It's almost too easy!

Next time to try some seasonings, herbs, etc.


Referenced Articles

www.thekitchn.com

www.instructables.com

Double Chocolate Banana Bread

We had some bananas that were not being eaten because they were a bit too ripe. As a joke, my wife said you could make some banana bread out of those as she was walking out the door. When she returned she found something better.

I found a couple recipes, but was missing vanilla that day, so a little ingredient improv came up with this recipe. I started with this as a base recipe.

Simply Recipes Banana Bread

and modified it to this:

Ingredients:

3 ripe bananas
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch salt
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup chocolate syrup

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Put the bananas in the mixer and mix them until mushy.
Put the rest of the ingredients in and mix until a nice batter has formed

Put batter in a small (4x8) bread pan and bake for 1 hour (actually more like 1:10)

Make sure to let it cool for a bit before removing from your pan as it can be gooey in the middle if you got a clump of banana.

I've also tried this with some chocolate chips too, but put in too many and the whole thing fell apart. It was still tasty, but it was a mess! Next time I'm gonna try it with 1/4 cup choc chips and see if that works a little better.

Generally speaking, in our house of 9, this loaf of banana bread doesn't last long.