New skill unlocked! Bread making!

 So nothing really has changed other than I am getting more confident in cooking in a small space. Lately it's been with fewer and fewer extra ingredients having run out of so many things. 

We were able to get to one of the food drive locations and had requested 3 households of food. Because I knew we would need it. We got three 2lb chubs of 'imitation ground beef' and three similar size packages of actual hamburger. We got some cheap cans of tuna and some veggies as well. Dozens of over ripe and tiny avocados and similar collection of brussel sprouts. We are using up the last of the hamburger today and tomorrow but am out of all the tomato products we usually use, still have some chicken thighs though. I get money this coming weekend and Amber is able to give us some extra money with the gas money for running the boys from school.

A very good friend Margaret that I met through the knitting group has been helping us with food surplus she can spare. I mentioned that we needed bread and sodas and coffee and she made a special trip just to pick up those for us to go with the veggies and other things.  I mentioned something about wanting to make bread because I found a peasant bread recipe a while back and had bought yeast to do it. She asked if I wanted some sourdough starter.

Don't ask me why but yeast and making bread has always been kind of weird for me. I have no idea where it came from but it's a borderline phobia about using yeast. Maybe it is a thing about if you fail making bread it's a total fail and no way of fixing it. I have no clue.

So anyway she sent me a full bag of whole wheat flour and a jar of sourdough starter. Oh. Joy! Um okay looks like there's no excuse now.

Well I looked up the simplest recipe for whole wheat bread and realized... other than not having a stand mixer it seemed relatively straightforward. Start with the easy stuff first.

I technically needed to put the water, honey and yeast in the mixing bowl but oh well. I got it all mixed, then came the kneading. I did the best I could given the cutting board was sliding around (I know how to fix that). Luckily I had a good bamboo cutting board big enough. We've got one that pulls out from under the counter but it's actually too big for the counter space.

After first rising. Kitchen is kind of drafty so I kept it on the back burner of the stove and waited for it to double roughly about an hour. Could have gotten a bit bigger I suspect.

After 'punching it down' and then putting it in the loaf pan (also supplied by my wonderful friend Margaret). and as it goes into the oven. This is another dicey point because our oven is erratic sometimes, being an ancient electric oven of a small size.

I cooked lunch while that was in the oven hence the foil on the burners to keep grease spatters off the elements.

I MADE BREAD! It looks wonderful! I didn't burn it, it's not undercooked, it thunked with a hollow sound when I tapped it with a wooden spoon (as per the directions). It has a kind of funky flavor which I attribute to it being fresh with no preservatives. It could use a little more honey though for my taste. It's a bit denser than the typical store loaf but also can be fixed as I get better at it. 

In the past few years I have had a yearning for being self sufficient and able to have food that doesn't require buying at the store. Gardening successfully was the first level and am slowly getting a handle on that. I can't grow wheat or corn in large enough quantities but buying the flour at the store is considerably cheaper than buying a loaf of bread every week in the long run. A 5 lb bag of whole wheat flour is about $6 (King Arthur at Walmart), bread flour is cheaper. When you consider you only need about 1 3/4 to 2 cups of that per loaf, and you get 18 cups per 5lb bag... that's roughly 10 loaves of bread per 5lb bag of flour. Even with a standard loaf of cheap white bread being only 1.97 if that... it's still cheaper on cost, a bit more time consuming. Took me two hours to make one loaf of bread but if I can  make more than one loaf a week and freeze one then I am saving.

So yeah I always figured making your own bread was cheaper than buying but now I need to get some white bread flour because whole wheat is good but I prefer white bread for sandwiches. Kind of like potatoes are just a stage for gravy. 

I will have to do bread three days a week now I suspect with as fast as we go through it. Next level challenge will be, sourdough. Duh duh duuuuuhhhh.