Julia’s White Bread

I was looking for a nice easy bread to try and I came across Julia Child's recipe for White bread. I LOVE my Baking with Julia cookbook so I figured this had to be good. Here is the recipe

2 1/8 cups water

2 tsp active dry yeast

2 tsp sugar

6 cups bread flour or all-purpose flour

2 tsp salt

¼ cup unsalted butter softened

1 Pour 1/2 cup of the water into a bowl and mix with yeast and sugar til foamy.

2 Let sit for 5 minutes until creamy.

3 Put the yeast mixture, rest of the water and 3 cups of the flour into the mixer with the dough hook.

4 Mix slowly until blended then add the rest of the flour.

5 Increase speed and scrape down the sides until the dough comes together.

6 (If it doesn't add a tbsp of flour at a time until it does.) Add salt and mix at medium speed for 10 minutes (or do half in mixer and half kneading) until dough is smooth and elastic.

7 Back in mixer add butter 1 tbsp at a time (dough may come apart, but mixing will pull it back together).

8 Turn dough out on lightly floured surface and shape it into a ball then place in a large buttered or oiled bowl.

9 Turn dough so it is completely coated in the fat, then cover in plastic for 45 minutes to an hour, until it has doubled in size at room temperature.

10 Butter 2 loaf pans.

11 Deflate the dough, cut in half and turn out onto a lightly floured surface.

12 Roll out into a 9 x 12-inch rectangle.

13 With the short end facing you, fold the dough into thirds like a sheet of paper to go into an envelope, creating a roll.

14 Pinch the seam closed, and pinch the ends enough so it will fit in the loaf pan.

15 Drop in the loaf pan seam side down, and repeat.

16 Cover the loaves with buttered plastic wrap and allow to rise again in a warm place (80°F) for 45 minutes, until they double in size.

17 Preheat the oven to 375°F and put the rack in the center of the oven.

18 Bake for 35-45 minutes until they are honey brown.

19 Immediately turn out of pans onto a rack to cool.

20 Once almost completely cool, they can be cut.

21 Store in a brown paper bag for a day or two.

22 Once cut, turn cut side down onto a cutting board and cover with a kitchen towel.

I followed the recipe to the letter with one exception. I never have unsalted butter in my house so I used salted butter and cut the amount of salt I added to the recipe in half.

I really enjoyed working with this bread dough, I was just imagining how great it would taste especially with butter in it! It rose beautifully and baked into a rather pretty loaf. I knew this would just be a standard white bread loaf so no expectations for anything "artisan" like. But still even with fairly low expectations I found this bread really lacking. It didn't taste like anything. Maybe it needed more salt, maybe I'm not used to a loaf that due to its quick rising times doesn't have time to really develop much flavor. I also didn't like the effect the rolling out and folding of the dough had on the final product. The inside was made up of a spiral of bread. When you cut it the darn thing unraveled. White bread is supposed to be great for sandwiches and toast. I couldn't successfully use it for either of those things! I think I will try some variation of this again but I wouldn't roll it out and I would definitely use more salt. Julia, I'm disappointed!

Little hands make awesome bread

I pulled out my bread machine the other day because I like it for making pizza dough. I saved a piece of Friday night's pizza dough and later in the evening used it to start a bread dough in my bread machine. I went the starter route mixing the dough with only warm water and flour. The next morning I used that starter which had sat out overnight to make the final dough using ¾ cup warm water, 3 cups flour, 1 tbsp kosher salt, 2 tsp yeast, 1 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp olive oil. I let it go the whole dough cycle in the bread machine and then transferred it to a bowl to rise another hour. Then Lily helped me stretch and fold it.

We let it rise in a warm place for 2 hours before shaping the dough. The loaves then rose another 2 hours before I steamed the oven and baked the loaves at 500 degrees.

It came out AWESOME! So yummy. The next day the crust was like leather but on the day it was baked it was wonderful! I need to remember to use my bread machine more often!

Sorta Sourdough

I've been trying to develop a sourdough starter, I used a cheat method and put a tiny bit of yeast in the starter and I think that made my sourdough develop really quickly, maybe too quickly and I missed its prime or didn't feed it enough. Not sure what exactally the problem was but this sourdough was so dense that it wasn't edible. I used the recipe I linked here. I used 2 cups of my sourdough starter plus 1/2 cup water, 3 cups flour, 1 tbsp kosher salt, 1 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp olive oil. I let it rise twice each time for about 4 hours but it didn't rise that much. The directions that I linked to (The John Ross directions) didn't really say much about rising times. The dough was rather wet so I baked it in loaf pans. I think 1st my sourdough starter wasn't active enough and second I didn't let the dough rise enough. Heres the end result.

It wasn't edible. Oh well better luck next time. I have a new starter going that I did not add yeast to, I'm hoping it develops better.

What do you do when you have too much zucchini? You make bread with it of course. I found this recipe for zucchini bread in one of my cookbooks and I made it. It came out sooo good. My kids even like it. It's a sweet quick bread, not a "real" bread like I've been making. But I am working on a sourdough too, those take a while to develop so in the meantime here's a really great zucchini bread recipe!



1 1/2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 cup vegtable oil

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

2 cups grated zucchini

1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (toasted ones are even yummier)

1 tbsp vanilla extract



Mix sugar, eggs & oil, beat with mixer until thick and lemon color, add flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon, beat until combined. Add zucchini, nuts and vanilla; mix until combined. Split into two greased loaf pans. Bake in 350 degree oven for 1 hour. Let cool before trying to remove from the pan.








I used walnuts in my bread but I'm lazy so I didn't toast my nuts, I bet the bread would have been even better if I did. You totally can't taste any zucchini in the bread. It is so wonderful for breakfast with a cup of tea, or for a nice late night snack with a cup of tea. I love tea and I love this zucchini bread. Try it with one of the zucchini your neighbor pawns off on you!

Boring old white bread

You sick of hearing about my bread yet? Well I wasn't tired of baking it. It was Sunday and I had one tiny little loaf left from the previous day. I need more bread. I had taken a piece of dough from the last bread and cultivated it in pretty much the same way I had my last batch of starter. Sunday morning when I opened it up to use it, gone was that nice full yeasty beerlike smell I usually get from my starter, and in its place was the smell of sour milk. Is that how sourdough starter is supposed to smell? I didn't think so, so down the drain it went. I was going to have to make a strait up bread dough, no starter. As a side note I need to follow the directions in the sourdough article I linked to and actually cultivate a real sourdough starter so I know what it is supposed to be like, maybe it is supposed to smell like sour milk. What do I know?!!

I based this dough on yesterdays dough, the ingredients were:

1 cup water

3 cups bread flour (need the extra gluten from a bread flour since there is no starter)

1 1/2 tsp yeast

2 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp sugar

1tbsp olive oil

I mixed it up in the kitchen aid, it was really crumbly so I let it sit 10 minutes for the flour to absorb the water and then turned on the KA. Still crumbly, so I added 3 tbsp of water, one at a time until the dough came together. I left it mixing about 5 minutes then transferred it to a bowl to rise. Today is Sunday, you know what Sunday is? The kids say "church day" and they're right, but it's also SOCCER DAY!!! I'm getting pretty sick of soccer! While I was at the soccer field from 11:30 to 3:30 (I must admit it was a gorgeous day to be outside!) my bread was rising. We had a Birthday party to go to after soccer so while the kids changed their clothes I put the dough back into the KA with the dough hook and let it ride for 5 minutes before plopping it back in the bowl and covering it. Back from the party (2 and a half hours had passed) I punched down the dough, folded it over 3 or 4 times and shaped it. This time I only made it into two loafs so they wouldn't be so small. I covered them, left them near the warm pellet stove and went about the business of bathing children and putting away laundry, agh the glamorous life of a mom! In the evening after the kids were tucked in I cranked the oven to 500 degrees and baked my bread. I was really happy with how it came out.

This is a basic white bread, nothing fancy but it was very similar to my "Soccer Day Bread" and very similar to the bread from the day before. I think that all my starters are doing is allowing me to use all purpose flour instead of bread flour but the taste and texture isn't really changed.

Bread from Sourdoughish starter

I had two bakes this weekend neither complicated but both successful, so I'm happy.

I had a piece of dough saved from my boomerang bread debacle, even though the bread turned out terrible the dough was not at fault so after reading this great Sourdough Bread baking article http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm I had begun a bit of a sourdough starter. I never do anything by the book which is one of the reasons some of my breads don't turn out so well. Again I strayed from the 'baking rules'. First of all when you make sourdough you don't start with a piece of old dough. You just start with flour and water. But I'm used to the poolish method so I thought I'd combine the two methods and make a sourdough poolish? Also when you feed a sourdough you're supposed to take half of the starter out and throw it away. I don't like throwing stuff away so I just added to it leaving everything in there. I did this for 3 days figuring I would just keep building it up and use it when I needed it. So Friday evening with not much going on in the house I decided to start up a batch of bread dough. I based the dough on the recipe from the sourdough website that I linked above. It calls for 2 cups starter, 3 cups flour, 2 tbsp olive oil, 4 tsp sugar, 2 tsp of salt. When I measured out my starter I only had 1 1/2 cups so I reduced all the other ingredients accordinglyish, you know, because I never do anything by the book. I ended up using

1 1/2 cups starter

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp kosher salt

1 tbsp x virgin olive oil

and then because the dough was just too dry to come together as it bounced around in the bowl of my Kitchen Aid I added 3 tbsp of water (1 at a time until the dough came together). If you read that sourdough baking link you will see that the author mentions that flour varies in absorbency and starters vary in wetness so I found it isn't against the rules to add more water or more or less flour depending on the look and feel of your dough. It actually means you're an experienced baker, so go me! Pleased with my dough I plopped it into a large plastic Tupperware bowl, covered it and left it on the kitchen table for an hour. I was ready for bed (it was 11pm) so I decided to give the bread another ride in the KA, back in it went and it spent 3 minutes rolling around on the dough hook and trying to escape out of the top of the bowl. I put it back in the Tupperware, covered it and let it rise overnight on the kitchen table. At 8am the next morning I had my hands back in the dough. The dough had more than doubled. I punched it down to let out the air and folded it over itself 3 or 4 times. I then cut it in thirds shaped it into small baguettes, laid it out on a flour cutting board, covered it with a flour dusted towel and let it rise while I took the kiddos to Dunkin Donuts and then 9 am soccer practice (ugh)

Back from soccer at 11 I preheated the oven, scored my loafs and slid them into the oven. They came out great, although very small, they look like little hoggie rolls J That's probably what I should have used them for! We ate one for lunch, it was yum! My brother-in-law even stopped by and got to sample it fresh out of the oven; I wrapped another one up to give my friend Michele.

Boomerang Bread

So last night I baked bread. And for breakfast this morning I had toasted...

wait for it…

...Wonder Bread. Hubby has dubbed last night's creation "Boomerang Bread" I just call it terrible. So here is what not to do when baking bread.

Sunday night I took some old dough and decided I would start feeding it, a poolish but sort of a sourdough starter. By Tuesday morning I had fed it 3 times. It was smelling rather pleasantly sourdoughish. I put it in the fridge to stop any further fermenting and left it there while I was at work. That evening I took the starter out of the refrigerator and after letting it warm up a bit on the counter I mixed my final dough. The starter plus ½ tsp yeast, 2 tsp salt, ¾ cup warm water and 3 cups all-purpose flour. I let it rise on the counter for 2 hours before covering and letting rest in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning I took it out of the refrigerator and plopped it into a larger bowl. Here it is important to note that I did not knead the bread or fold it over or anything, I think that wasn't a good thing. I was in a rush so I covered it and left it to rise on my counter while I worked.

When I came home after work the dough had risen nicely. I split it into 2 chunks then squeezed and rolled it into 2 loafs and after 45 minutes baked it. So really no kneading of this dough and not much rise time before baking. It was also a sticky wetter dough which made it hard to work with. I scored the first loaf and baked it, we were anxious to eat it so I took it out of the oven before it was really nice and brown. By the time I got ready to put in the second loaf I was trying to eat dinner which may be why I forgot to score that loaf and why, due to careless transfer to the oven, my loaf bent into sort of a boomerang shape.

See I told you it was terrible. Note that since I didn't score it, theres a blowout on the side of the loaf. And thats why you should score your bread, so it expands where you want it to and it doesn't look like crap. We gnawed on the 1^st loaf while it was still warm but in the morning when I tried to cut the boomerang loaf to toast, I couldn't get a knife through it. So embarrassing. I'm contemplating what to do next. Really I'd like some more of my 'soccer day bread'. The weekend is coming I may have to try to recreate that success.

Soccer Day Bread

On Sunday I just couldn't stand having a day without bread baking. I had made my rather flat 2 day old starter bread on Saturday night and now there was nothing rising or baking in my kitchen. So I decided to see what kind of a bread I could create in one day. I worked with the same 4 ingredients I have been using; white flour, water, salt and yeast; oh and a piece of old dough.

I had saved a piece of the dough from my last batch of bread so I broke that in pieces and let soften in ½ cup warm water for 10 minutes. I then added 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour and 2/3 of a cup of bread flour. If you're wondering why I bother with the different flours, my thought was that the bread flour has higher gluten levels so I thought since I had a shorter time to let the gluten develop in my bread that maybe bread flour was the way to go, but I had already started with the all -purpose flour so I ended up with both. I had to use my hands to really incorporate everything.

I let it sit for 10 minutes to let the water be absorbed then I put it to mix with the dough hook in my Kitchen Aid. I went ahead and mixed the final dough now. As I'm retyping this it seems like maybe the whole first part was an extra step. I'm not really sure what it did! So I added 1 cup water, 3 cups bread flour, 1 tsp yeast and 2 tsp salt. I let this ride in the KA for 8 minutes on a med/low speed then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and placed in in a warm spot near our pellet stove, which on Sunday was on, yes it was that chilly!

Off I went in that cold weather to watch my little one play soccer. Three hours later I returned my risen dough to the KA which ran for 4 minutes. I then shaped the loaves and let them rise for 1 hour before putting them in a 500 degree oven that had been steamed. I reduced the temp to 400 after 5 minutes and baked an additional 12 minutes. Here is a photo of the result:

Not bad right? The dough was a much stiffer dough. I was able to shape it into loaves which in the hour I let them rise kept a great shape and gained some bulk. I had my first really sucessful scoring. I used a razor blade to slash the tops of my loaves and they split open just right. It was very satisfying. The crust had this amazing crackle. The inside was really soft and fluffy with lots of tiny little air bubbles, no big stretchy holes. I like big stetchy holes. This was very similar to a store bought Italian bread. I think it was a really good 'every day' kind of bread but it isn't special. So I'm trying to take what I learned from this dough and apply the good things like the hydration level of the final dough, the rise time of the final dough and the scoring technique and apply them to a longer fermenting bread which should have more complex flavor and lots of big stretchy holes!

When I got home from work at the end of Day 1 my "old dough starter" had about doubled in size. Before starting on dinner I mixed up my second stage starter, incorporating the "old dough starter" with more flour and water. I let that rise in a Tupperware container covered with plastic wrap until 10:00PM. This is what it looked like :

I took that starter and mixed the final dough in my Kitchen Aid. Right after mixing this is what my final dough looked like:

I covered it and left it out on the kitchen table overnight

The next morning it had really risen!

I folded I the dough over onto itself several times as best I could, it was really sticky and soft. Then plopped it into 3 flour dusted, towel lined bread pans. The bread pans were to keep the bread in a form as it rose since it was so loose it wouldn't have risen into a loaf shape if I had left it out on a flat surface to rise. I covered the bread pans and went to work. When I came home from work the loaves looked like this:

I preheated my oven to 500 degrees then took my peel style cutting board, sprinkled with rice flour and turned the dough out of the towel lined pan onto the cutting board. It immediately became very pancake like. The dough was too soft to hold the shape. I threw a cup of water onto a cookie sheet I had at the bottom of my oven to "steam" my oven and then slid the 1^st loaf of bread in.

After 5 minutes of 500 degree cook time I lowered the temp to 400 and baked another 15 before I fetched my bread from the oven and this is what it looked like:

VERY FLAT!! I wasn't too happy. But I cut it open and liked the look of the inside:

The taste was quite good too. I baked two more loaves, one of them very similar to the 1^st, the last I folded over a few times then shaped into a long baguette. That went into the oven about a half hour later. I don't really like the tiny size slices of bread that a French style baguette provides but that was the best looking best risen loaf of the three.

I think there's two things that didn't work here. 1^st my dough was too wet for the type of loaf I wanted to make. I think if I cooked in in some type of a pan the result might be better. If I want the more rustic free form bread then my final dough will have to be a bit drier. Also I was surprised that the loaf didn't gain much height when I put it in the oven. I think it is necessary to at least fold the dough over a few times within 2 hours of baking it. Having not worked the loaf at all for 8 hours prior to baking it didn't work. 8 hours of rising meant there was no more rising left for the dough to do when it hit the oven.

So next I will make the same recipe in the same steps using slightly less water in the final dough and giving the dough a fold and final shape 45 minutes before baking it.