Breadmaking Day

Monday is my usual breadmaking day but we have a lot going on this week – almost every day there’s something, and I need the entire morning to get bread made. I only make whole wheat breads now – with fresh milled flour. Usually I’ll make plain sandwich bread and something else. It may be hamburger buns or tortillas or some kind of rolls or a heavily seeded loaf bread. Then during the week, I’ll often make bran muffins with fruit (apple/cranberry are my favorites) or a blueberry or apple loaf – some almost dessert like bread. Knowing it may be Friday before I have a chance to bake again, I made sandwich bread, English Muffins and hamburger buns.

The first thing I made this morning was the English Muffins. I have mentioned here before how much I dislike raisins but then I tried the Azure Thompson raisins and I think I’m addicted to them now. Before finding these raisins, my favorite English Muffins were made with chopped dried cranberries but now, my favorite is made with raisins.

The dough for this recipe has to be made 12 hours before cooking and sit out to “ferment”. When I got in bed late last night, it was 64 in the house so I wasn’t sure the dough was going to rise much but it was perfect when I got up.

This is the recipe I use for the sourdough English Muffins. These are great for breakfast, or for sandwiches. I want to try making rye sourdough English muffins and see how that works. They would be great for making reubens! My favorite thing about making these is that they’re “baked” in a skillet on top of the stove so if there’s no power, I could still make these.

Next I started the hamburger buns because we needed those for lunch. I love making these. They’re so easy and I’ve never had a fail with them. I use

We had cream of asparagus soup and Sloppy Joes for lunch. I only eat half of a bun and eat it with a fork so that’s why there’s 1-1/2 missing. I made the buns a bit larger today and made 11 instead of 12. This week we have hamburgers and hot browns on the menu for this week. The turkey for the hot brown will come from a jar that I canned a while back.

This is the recipe I use for the hamburger buns.

Finally, I made two loaves of sandwich bread. This is the recipe I use for sandwich bread. This is funny – the recipe shows ingredients for using two 4 x 8″ pans; two 4.5 x 8.5″ pans and for two 5 x 9″ pans. I use cast iron bread pans (affiliate link), which I’ve used for years. I love them because I never have to oil them, never have to wash them – I just turn them upside down, the loaf of bread falls out and they’re perfectly clean. I store them in the oven so I don’t have to worry about bugs or mice or dust (hopefully) getting in them.

For all these years, I’ve thought those pans were 4 x 8″. They’re shorter, or appear to be shorter than regular small loaf pans so I made the recipe for 4 x 8″ loaves. It was short but I just thought that’s how it is with whole wheat home milled flour. The other day I was looking at the pictures on the Grains in Small Places website and realized my bread really was short. I measured my pans and yep, they’re 4.5 x 8.5″ so I used those ingredients today and my bread was really tall!

Vince kept saying “It smells so good in here!” When the bread cooled and he cut himself a slice, he said “This is the BEST bread you’ve ever made!” Nope . . cannot be . . it’s exactly the same bread I’ve been making for several years, it’s just a bigger loaf.