Bread

A few days ago an old friend asked me to give him my bread recipe, so I did that and also pointed him at my video on Youtube. That is when I realised how terrible my video was, and decided I needed to shoot a new one! This uses my basic dough recipe, which is 600g flour, 1 tablespoon oil, 1 tsp salt, one tsp yeast, 1 tablespoon honey, and 350ml water.

I've been using my basic dough recipe the last while and experimenting with different combinations of flour. The recipe calls for 600g, but you can mix-and-match it just about any way you like. I've been on a bit of an oats kick lately, so that has been factoring into my bread as well. Oats are very low in gluten, so I've found that when using 1/4 of the flour as oats, you have to add gluten flour to account for this.

The loaf on the left here is made with barley, and the French bread is made with oats. Here is the basic recipe I've been working with :

• 75g gluten flour
• 125g oat or barley flour
• 250g whole wheat flour
• 150g white flour

I've made cinnamon buns, a fair bit of French Bread, as well as regular loaf bread.

Yesterday was a banner day! I decided to make my own BBQ sauce and in order to do that I had to grill some sausages. But for those, I of course needed some sausage buns. Fortunately I had half of my batch of Basic Dough in the fridge, so I divided it into 4 and rolled each piece out and put it into my baguette pan. I preheated the oven to 485F and baked for about 18 to 20 minutes with the convection turned off.

This yeasted dough is really easy to throw together if you have a bread machine. Actually, even if you do not, mix it together just til everything is wet and then let stand covered in a bowl for 12 hours and let the gluten develop on its own. This is a new method I've just recently seen and will be doing a video for. Missing from this video is the addition of the 1/4 cup of olive oil - somehow I managed to mess up that clip while doing the video.

Mix

• 350ml water (or beer)
• 1 (generous) tablespoon honey

I adapted my cinnamon bun recipe for the dough cycle of our bread machine.

• 350ml liquid - 50/50 water and milk
• heat in microwave about 55 seconds til it is 100F/40C
• mix in 1-2 tablespoon honey til dissolved
• mix in 1 tablespoon dry yeast til dissolved
• let proof 5-10 minutes
• put into bread machine

If you are using bread machine yeast you don't need to proof. But I am not, and I like proofing yeast anyway

• add 1/4 cup oil
• add 1 tsp salt
• add 600g flour

For flour, I've been using various mixtures but 600g is roughly :

• 3 tablespoons gluten flour
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 cup barley or white flour