Not To Be Trusted With Knives

I was in the mood to cook something exciting for dinner tonight, but I couldn’t seem to find any recipes that got me jazzed up, so instead I decided to channel my creative cooking energy into baking some bread. I baked some last week, but it turned out too dry, so I went in search of a different recipe, which I ended up getting from Rebecca.

Before I embarked on the baking, I went to the produce store so I’d have something to cook to go with the bread¹ At said produce store I came across what seemed to me to be the biggest plums I’ve ever seen:

And then I saw this potato, which is about the size of my head!

Tomorrow I shall turn this into the biggest French fries you’ve ever seen!

I also came across these two strange looking things:

which were labeled only as “Assorted Indian vegetables.” Anyone have any idea what they are?

Also, do not fear, the door in the produce store is never far away:

After my produce store run, it was time to bake some bread!

First up was “foaming” the yeast. This is where you mix together active dry yeast, sugar, and lukewarm water. The yeast will start to eat the sugar, resulting in this bubbly looking fluid:

Once that was sufficiently foamed, I added the rest of the ingredients and then kneaded the dough². The dough had to rise for 1.5 hrs, which gave me enough time to putter around and then go for a run. When I got back from my run, I discovered this:

Apparently when they say that the dough will double in size, that’s your cue to put the dough in a bowl that is double the size! D’oh! ³

Next up was punching down the dough, splitting it into two and putting it into the loaf pan and allowing it to rise again.  Now, I only seem to have one loaf pan⁴, so I made one traditional loaf:

And used the rest of the dough to make some buns and some other bread shapes:

And then baked to perfection:

Thanks for the recipe, Rebecca!

1. for the record, I made teriyaki stirfry with a bunch of veggies with Beefless Tips from Gardein. So. Yummy. [↩]
2. and why I say that “I” kneaded the dough, I mean “I” kneaded the dough by attaching the dough hook to my Kitchen-Aide mixer and let it do the heavy lifting [↩]
3. In truth, I knew the dough would rise about the top of the bowl. I just didn’t think it would be quite this much above the top of the bowl! [↩]
4. could have sworn I had two [↩]

Tags: baking, baking bread, bread, dough is delicious, fruit, produce, vegetables

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 10:49 pm and is filed under food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.