Food Friday - Bread Alone

From Kris B.

I am a fan of anything oatmeal - oatmeal cookies, granola, plain old oatmeal for breakfast, and oatmeal bread.  I was buying a store brand of oatmeal bread, which was appalling to my daughter the bake; so, she developed an oatmeal bread recipe just for me.  As I was writing this post, I asked her what she wanted me to call her bread.  Her response was, “George.”  Though I am 99% sure she was just mouthing off at me, I went with it.  I am OK with calling the bread “George” because that was my dad’s name.  When I was at home, my dad was the bread baker in the family so somehow this all makes some weird kind of sense in my head.  If you’d rather not call your bread “George,” Oatmeal Bread will certainly do.

Asking Brooke for the actual recipe was not anymore straight forward than getting a name.  She first told me that she didn’t have the recipe written down.  I can appreciate that as there are many things that I make for which I have no written recipe.  Instead of thinking it through and writing the recipe down for me, she made the bread and I got to take notes in order to document the process.  Who knew that bread baking could become a spectator sport?  I was graciously given a concrete list of ingredients before the event got underway.

INGREDIENTS

1 Cup steel cut oats, cooked

1 TBS *Instant yeast

1 1/3 cups dry milk

2 oz. butter

1 pound all purpose flour

1/2 pound whole wheat flour

1/2 cup honey

1 cup rolled oats

2 tsp salt

You may notice an inconsistency in the way the measurements are presented here—the flour in by weight and the other ingredients in standard cooking measurements.  In culinary school, the ingredients for all recipes were given by weight.  To my daughter, who is not a fan of washing dishes, this is a big plus.  She puts the mixing bowl on the scale, zeros it out, and starts adding ingredients, monitoring the weight on the scale.  In her words, “Everyone should prefer to cook this way.  You don’t have to wash all those measuring cups and spoons.”  She does have a point, sort of.  For those of you that don’t have a kitchen scale and don’t mind washing dishes, a pound of flour is roughly four cups.  So for this recipe you will use four cups of all purpose flour and two cups of whole wheat flour.  The good thing about bread is that there is a bit of leeway in the exact amount of flour needed.

• Instant yeast differs from active dry yeast in that it has smaller granules and does not require proofing, but can be added directly to the dry ingredients.  The two can be used interchangeably, but the active dry yeast does require proofing and may add an additional 10-15 minutes on to the rise time of your bread.

The Recipe:

1. Cook the steel cut oats in 2 cups of water.  Cook until all of the water is absorbed by the oats.  Add the honey and butter to the warm oats.  Mix thoroughly.
2. In a mixer bowl, combine the two flours, dry milk, and yeast.  Stir until combined.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients.  Knead for five minutes in a stand mixer with the dough hook, or by hand.
4. Add the rolled oats and the salt.  Knead for another one to two minutes.
5. If the dough feels too dry, add a little water a tablespoon at a time.  If it feels too wet, add some all purpose flour a little bit at a time until the bread “feels right.”  This is the part that takes practice!
6. Cover the bowl and let the dough rise for an hour.
7. Punch down the dough.  Divide it in half and place in two standard loaf pans.  Allow to rise for another hour.
8. Bake in a 375 degree oven for 30-35 minutes or until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.
9. Remove the loaves from the pans and cool on a wire rack.

This is a chewy bread with a lot of texture.  It works well for sandwiches or toast.  And, is especially tasty with butter or peanut butter and some pumpkin butter.



From Tracey G.

When Kris and I talked about what kind of recipe to do for this week, we decided a bread would be good. Immediately I knew what I wanted to try, a pull-apart bread. And since I've seen so many recipes for it, I culled them all and then developed my own "recipe", if you can call it that, lol. I'd say it's more of a method really. Vary the ingredients and you have a completely different spin on the pull-apart bread idea. That's not to say that this simple recipe wasn't without it's hang-ups. I think at one point, my statement to Kris was "I think for some reason the Universe doesn't want me to get this recipe out there!". 

I'd made the bread dough a day ahead of time. Most recipes call for frozen bread dough - but I love making bread so it was the perfect excuse to get me back into the swing of it - I'd like to get back to making it every week like I used to, when I was caregiver to my mom. Due to her special diets I had to work with, sodium was a huge restriction on both the renal and heart diet - and commercial, store-bought bread, is insane with sodium! We were given a list of the worst sodium offenders and it was the either number one or close to number one on the list! So, I took to making homemade so she could still enjoy sandwiches and toast etc, because homemade is much more reasonable sodium-wise. I baked at least 4 loaves a week, and would wrap them and freeze them - on that schedule we always were ahead of the game! And I even discovered that you can accidentally forget to add the salt altogether and it still turns out fine - little flat tasting, but still pretty good!

So, I made my own for this recipe. As my bread dough recipe makes 2 loaves, I baked one as a traditional loaf, and, since I ran out of time for the pull-apart bread recipe, I did what the yeast packet suggested and put the dough into the fridge until I could get back to it. They recommend getting back to it within 24 hours and picking up where you left off for rising - perfect! I can finish it the next day! Well, when the next day came along, once I got it put all together, I forgot to account for a little extra time needed for the now cold dough to rise, and I should have realized that. So, that put me even further behind schedule than I was, due to the garlic butter shortage I encountered.

 Since I'd created the recipe from quite a few other recipes, I averaged out the butter and garlic amounts I'd need. I thought I had enough with 6 tbsp, and, had the dough been room temperature, I probably would have had enough, but  the chilled dough seemed to be chilling up my butter mixture too and things were getting a bit more heavily coated with the butter mixture than they probably should have. So, I ended up melting up 4 more tablespoons of butter and mincing up another clove of garlic!  For my finished recipe I am adding only 2 more tbsp to my original 6, to get 8 total, and one more clove of garlic, making the total 5 instead of 4. I'd rather have a little too much than not enough!

Finally got it all put together, let it rise and let it rise and let it rise (thanks to the chilled dough), and it was now time to bake! Most recipes had bake times of 30 minutes. For some reason, my oven seemed to be having issues and I had to tack on about an extra 15 minutes to my bake time. Yes, this recipe seemed to have more setbacks than I've ever encountered, but it does make for a more interesting story as to how it all came about and together!  And to top it off, pulling it all off with this crazy miserable cold was a feat unto itself!!! And this stupid cold is also the reason for the recipe photo being taken with my phone and Hipstamatic app - Loftus Len and DC film.

Final verdict though, was that, for all the minor setbacks and issues, it was well worth it! It turned out to be super yummy - and super easy really, and definitely something I'll make often!

Garlic Butter Pull Apart Bread

1 lb frozen white bread dough, thawed

8 tbsp butter, melted

5 cloves of garlic, minced

2-3 tsp dried parsley

Combine the melted butter, garlic and parsley. Cut the bread dough into 1" pieces, dip into butter mixture and layer into a greased 9x5" loaf pan. Cover and let rise until doubled (about an hour if using non rapid rise yeast). Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until light golden brown.