Making Bread

These are crazy times and who can even guess whether there will be food shortages in the future and if so, what might be in short supply. A friend in TN wrote me yesterday that their Sam’s Club was out of toilet paper, milk and flour yesterday. I haven’t seen shortages here, nor have I seen limits on anything other than the antibacterial wipes and sprays.

There are lots of things we can do without but for us, bread is pretty essential. With a good bread recipe, I can make sandwich bread, rolls, hamburger buns, cinnamon rolls, monkey bread (sweet or savory) . . most any kind of bread we need. Don’t forget that leftover bread can easily be made into bread crumbs or croutons for soups or salads, and both can be frozen.

Now, while things are in the store, if you’re someone who eats bread, please buy a couple of extra bags of flour and a pound of yeast!

Pleasant Hill Grain has instant yeast at a reasonable price. King Arthur has it for a little more and they have both types of yeast. I prefer instant yeast – one less bowl to have to wash.

As far as flour, Walmart usually has Wheat Montana all purpose flour and that is, hands down, my favorite flour. They seem to be out online now but they do have Prairie Gold, which is my favorite storebought whole wheat flour. I usually grind my own.

For the bread recipe, Amish White Bead has been my go to bread recipe for as long as I’ve been using the internet for recipes. It is the easiest recipe! I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s “no fail” but I know anything is possible so . . use your head and it will be fool proof!

Note: I reduce the sugar by half (use 1/3 cup instead of 2/3 cup) for regular bread. If I’m making cinnamon rolls, I might make it a heaping 1/3 cup. If I’m mixing in things like jalapenos, cheese, herbs, I’ll use less than 1/3 cup.

Not long ago, a friend asked me about my favorite bread recipe and I shared the link to this one. She has become a bread maker extraordinaire! She was a breadmaker before but she has been making gorgeous breads and rolls using this recipe.

Yesterday for lunch I made the full (two loaf) recipe, reducing the sugar and subbing 1 cup of regular flour with one cup of einkorn flour. I made the rols 85 g. each so they were a good size roll. I dipped each top in melted butter with garlic and they were so delicious! I think I’ll do the same thing for Thanksgiving but I’ll put onions through the food processor, mix that into melted butter, add just a bit of salt (I do use unsalted butter) and dip the tops in that.

From the full recipe, I got 24 rolls so, even with Chad, Nicole and Addie here, we had rolls leftover. I think we’re having 9 here or Thanksgiving, including us, so that will be the perfect number of rolls. I could even make them 80 grams and they’d still be nice, plump rolls and we’d get a few more but 85 grams is a nice size or a sandwich i there are leftovers.