Victims of my experiments

“The first person you should feed your bread to is not your kids who are dying of hunger, but yourself. How else can you know if it’ll kill someone or not?” ~Imaginary baker

The path to secret dish #3 has been trying. Along the way lines the bodies of failed experiments. Some bread were complimented by people as good, but didn’t meet my expectation. Some… are just awful. The rest of this entry contains many pictures and their captions explains the different lessons I learned throughout so I suggest you actually visit the site and click on the images to read their captions.

The Plan

On average, I make and consume around one loaf of bread every other day and 1 kilogram of flour can produce about 5 loaf of bread. At $2.99 per kilo, we are looking at some serious reduction in groceries. I double checked my credit card statement and indeed, my weekly groceries spending went from $60 down to $40 weekly. The ramp down is part of my more aggressive tactics in saving up for the back packing trip as well as scale down in waste production. I know averages one large back of garbage every two weeks and one bin of recycled fliers every second week and I think it’s a good number. To go even longer without emptying my garbage would mean that I have to potentially endure the smells that reeks out of my garbage bag, which can only be rectified, if I managed to achieve a 100% consumption rate on all the food I buy before they spoil.

As my skill in cooking increases, I find myself going ever lower in the food chain for ingredients until eventually, I end up buying raw and unprocessed food in their natural forms. Surprisingly, raw food material (except for meat) are all cheaper than their processed counter parts. It was a pleasant to discover that the best bread flour (whole wheat stone ground organic flour) actually cost less than their machine created counter parts. On top of that, you don’t have to pay taxes for unprocessed food. With these added bonus, I should be able to reach a point where the weekly grocery bill is only $30. Environmental friendly, better tasting AND cheaper, why didn’t I do this before?

The Path

I still haven’t successfully reverse engineered the Focaccia bread that made me fell in love with baking, but I believe that I will eventually reach my goal. I first bought this bread at my local Loblaws and always check for its availability when I go shopping.

Failure #1: Techniques

I still remember making my first home made bread. It was messy, it took a long time and the bread didn’t rise because my hands are too weak to knead it properly. But I have improved since then. The mess is now gone by using my fingers during the initial mixing phase while a special flour pattern holds the water and ingredient in a confined space. Kneading is improved by applying massage techniques to the dough and intertwining the training of both massage and kneading techniques.

Failure #2: Rising

Immediately following the newbie mistakes is my failure to understand the chemistry of bread making. The fluffiness is caused by the air bubbles created by the yeast germs when they ferment. Elasticity is created at the same time when the bubbles grow bigger and stretches the gluten. There might be some technique to knead the dough so as to maximize the length of gluten. I also learned that the flavor is caused by the chemical reactions that the yeast germs make after encountering water and air. So the longer you let the bread rise, the more flavorful your bread becomes. Did you know that the germ in your hand interacts with the yeast germ and multiplies to create the scent as well? I certainly didn’t know that when I started.

Failure #3: Flavoring

Flavoring the bread is quite tough. Salt kills the yeast and sugar feeds it. Spice kills the germs while too much impurity prevents the dough from rising. You really have to balance trade offs and time the addition each ingredient carefully. Too much and you got a flat dough, too little and you can’t taste the flavor at all.

Failure #4: Baking

Baking is another art of its own. Right off the bat, you have to decide how hard you want the crust to be and what kind of look you want it to have. Based on your decision, you can apply a mixture of butter, olive oil, flour, knife, water or steam techniques to the surface in order to create different texture and hardness.

Failure #5 #6: Flour

The type of flour dictates the base taste of each bread and the room temperature of rising dictates which chemicals get produced by the germs. These are the two most basic and prevailing taste of your bread. Master them well.

Conclusion

There you have it, my journey up to this point of bread making. Some have tasted my failed creation already with mixed results. I hope that one day, my friends will request my bread when they invite me over for dinner. It is certainly not the end as I still have a lot of ideas to try out. Hope you enjoyed reading about my journey as much as I did traversing it.