Real Bread

Mr VST and I don't didn't eat that much bread. We would buy a loaf and then put it in the freezer and eat it as and when we wanted to, usually on a Sunday evening as cheese on toast. 

There were two main reasons why I decided to make my own bread. The first was, having not eaten bread very often for the last couple of years I was almost always disappointed with the bread that we bought. A couple of times I have really fancied some fresh bread and bought some (admittedly from a supermarket)  only to find that it is tasteless fluff. The thing that really spurred me on was reading about the 'Chorleywood Process' (more of which here) which made me realise why the bread I was eating was tasteless fluff but I also realised that it isn't all vegetarian (for a list of Vegetarian Society Approved bread products click here) due to the procedures they use, human hair any one? 

I bought the River Cottage Handbook No. 3: Bread which arrived last weekend. I thought I had carefully read the 50 or so pages on how to make the basic loaf and so on Saturday I embarked, nervously, on making my first loaves. For some reason I had it in my head that making a nice 'normal' loaf was going to be really difficult. I had experimented with spelt bread and ciabatta before with some success. The basic recipe in the River Cottage book is for a white loaf. I couldn't face that so I made a 70/30, white/wholemeal mix. 

There are three ways just to mix the ingredients detailed in the River Cottage book! I chose number two, which was mixing the water and flour together, leaving them for half an hour and then mixing in the yeast and salt, before kneading the dough for ten minutes and then letting it rise.

And rise it did. Twice. This was before I realised that 'proving' was actually just a kind of second rising.

Rising number two

I didn't realise that you had to get the bread into the shape you want before proving, I got a bit mixed up with the whole 50-odd page recipe to be honest.

'Proving'

After they had 'proved' I cut them as suggested, although not quite as deep as I should have for one of them. They actually looked like the ones on the book though!

Dan Stevens doesn't seem to be a fan of loaf tins but I wanted to make one 'normal' shaped loaf as well.

I was VERY pleased with the results.

Once we had waited, patiently, for the bread to cool we sliced it up and ate it with butter and jam and ended up eating over half the loaf. It really was good! In fact it was even better than the 'artisan' loaf of white I had bought earlier in the week to tide us over while I got to grips with the recipe which had been quite heavy and a bit too salty.

The other two loaves I sliced, wrapped in plastic and put in the freezer before we ate them too.

To find out more about real bread see the Real Bread Campaign website.