To Bread Or Not To Bread- That Is The Question

Over the years I had tried the fine art of baking bread. Many, many, MANY attempts failed. My family would resort to categorizing the failures with names like hockey pucks, cinnamon swirl rocks and Flintstone bread. Most of my bread-making was not edible, not even to the dogs. They would leave the mounds scattered about the yard, after rains would soften the bread slightly it would grow glorious forests of mold and mildew in colors ranging from light gray to vivid green to vile black.

Even though I loved the smell of fresh bread baking in the kitchen, I gave up. It just wasn’t worth all the effort to possibly come up with something that could be eaten without a knife, a fork, liquid to soften it and slathering a slice with a half pound of butter first. That was the case until a friend showed up with a bread maker, and my daughter presented me with a book entitled 250 Best American Bread Machine Baking Recipes. I was astounded that there could be so many variations of a basic dough!

I was inspired to try out the recipes in the book and having the ease of a bread machine to do all the work would make the whole process as simple as pushing a button at the beep. My first dilemma came when I opened the book, I could not decide if I wanted an Oatmeal Molasses Bread or Tex-Mex Bread with Monterey Jack and Chilies or any of the other 248 varieties so I took the next logical step.

I skipped through the table of contents, the acknowledgements page, boring chapters called the Preface (for a cookbook? are you kidding me?),  7 pages of Introductions, a page titled By Request and yet another page titled Tips for Terrific Loaves. Finally reaching the first recipe on page 21 called Old-Fashioned Goodness Cracked Wheat Bread with every intention to make EVERY single recipe in the book starting with the very first one and making notes on the taste and quality of each one.

Enthusiasm built on the fact that the first recipe yielded a loaf of bread that was actually edible, even though the old-fashion goodness of cracked wheat was only wheat flour since I never did find something called cracked wheat when shopping the baking isle at the local store.

After about 20 recipes in to this amazing book, my Aunt had given me her basic recipe that she uses as a base for cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, pepperoni bread( more of this in a later post) and several other recipes. I don’t get around to trying all those new, sensational recipes in the book since getting this one from her. I find that now that I have a good base, I can come up with some really good variations on my own. I did not throw the book out, I still use it as a reference once and a while, but this is always my ‘go-to’ base recipe and use the bread machine on dough setting to get started the easy way.

Rolls

4 3/4 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 t. salt

1/4 cup oil

1 pkg. (2 1/4 t.) yeast

1/3 cup powdered milk

1 1/4 cup water

1 egg

Combine 1 3/4 cup flour, yeast, sugar, powder milk and salt in large bowl. Combine with water, oil and sugar (Aunty used an electric mixer at this stage for a full minute after fully mixed).

Stir in (by hand) 2 1/2 cups flour, and continue to knead in enough flour to yield a soft dough.

Roll out dough for desired size and place on cookie sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 3 hours up to 20 hours.

Remove dough from fridge to warm slightly and remove plastic wrap. Bake 28-30 minutes at 350 degrees.