Finally, a recipe for good sandwich bread

My main goal with all this bread baking recently has been to find a recipe for a good, solid sandwich bread.  If I can make my own bread, that is one less thing that I need to make frequent trips to the grocery for.  I know, I could buy bread in bulk and freeze it, but honestly, I'm not that crazy about thawed out bread.  It's cheaper to bake my own, too.

With my current attempt at a sour dough starter heading the same direction as the last one did, I decided to give a different bread recipe a try.  I made the Whole Wheat Bread recipe from The Joy of Cooking and it turned out pretty good.  It definitely has a dense enough texture to make a fine sandwich bread.  The taste is a little lacking, but I think next time I'll use the upper range of the honey suggested (she suggests 1/4 to 1/2 cup of honey and I used 1/4).  I think some add ins would be nice too, like flax seeds or sunflower seeds or maybe some wheat germ.  The recipe makes three loaves, which is cool because I like to make a bunch of bread at once, but it may have been a little much for my stand mixer to knead.  Yes, gasp, the happy homesteader has given up hand kneading and instead kneads her bread in a stand mixer.  Well...unless I'm mad at someone, then I knead bread.  Kneading bread by hand should be reserved for therapeutic purposes.  I'm a little nervous, though, because I heard a weird grinding sound from my mixer and I hope I didn't hurt it.  Keep your fingers crossed for my mixer.

First major failure of the homesteading adventure...

The first major failure is...starting a sourdough yeast culture in my kitchen.  I used the recipe in the Joy of Cooking book for starting a culture from the yeast in the air in your kitchen.  The first day, it started bubbling and had that scrumptious yeasty bread smell.  The directions, though, said let it go for 4-7 days before using it.  I did and yesterday was day 5 and it was super sour...not in a good way.  I decided to give it a shot and see what it tasted like anyways and used it to make a half loaf of the sourdough bread.  It was disgusting.  It had this sickingly sweet sour taste and it didn't rise at all.  I have to admit, I was afraid to eat it and am still worried that I'm going to fall over dead in the next few hours from eating something that...well...let's just say that you shouldn't make bread from anything that would get first prize in a middle school science fair!

I will give starting a starter from scratch one more shot before breaking down and ordering a sourdough starter off the internet.  If I get that good yeasty smell again on the first day, I may just use that and see what happens.  We bake so much bread in our kitchen that I'm sure we have spores floating around.  If I could get my husband to brew a batch of homebrewed beer, that may add to our airborn yeast count.  I'm sure women 75 years ago didn't get the best starters the first time around, either.

Bread

Last night I tried the no knead easy bread recipe from the Mother Earth News website.  The idea is to make a big batch of dough and keep it in the fridge, taking out grapefruit size balls of dough at a time to bake.  I made the recipe that uses 3 cups water, 1 1/2 tbsp of yeast, 1 1/2 tbsp of salt and 6 1/2 cups of flour.

I found the directions to be a little confusing so I don't know if it turned out correctly.  The recipe kept emphasizing that the dough needs to be wet...I got an EXTREMELY wet dough.  It was the consistency of that toy slime they used to sell.  It just kind of globbed and dripped between my fingers.  I added enough flour to the "grapefruit sized ball" to actually make it a relatively round shape and let it rise.  It didn't make a big loaf of bread...maybe dinner sized with four servings.  It was really dense though, which I like really dense breads, and it was kind of salty, so I didn't need to add butter to it. (I'm finding that most of the time when you want to put butter on something, you really want to put salt on it.  Garlic salt mixed with walnut oil is a great substitute for butter flavor.)

The recipe says that as the dough ages in the fridge, it gets more of a sour dough quality to it and the taste continues to improve.  I'll let you know what it does.  So far the recipe is 5 stars for taste and a 2 stars for ease of use.  I'll make another loaf this afternoon and we'll see what the difference is.