Date night! Soup in bread bowls, part 1

Once in a while, we like to have a quiet date night at home. It's a good excuse for me to pull out some more involved, or fancier recipes. This entry is the first of what will be an ongoing segment on date night meals.

I've been making cream of sweet potato and peanut soup for years. Last week I got ambitious, and decided to serve this soup in home-made bread bowls. It turned out very well, and I was very sorry that I hadn't documented any of it. So, I'm making it again. : )

Edit, 11/27/10: So, I was going to make cream of sweet potato. I'll make that another time. We ended up making cream of broccoli soup instead. 

It's important to remember that bread bowls must be made at least a day in advance. The reason for this is that you want the crust to dry out a little bit. Fresh out of the oven bread is still a little soft, and adding soup to a soft bread bowl is a recipe for disaster, as it will soak right through the outer layer of bread, and the bowl will fall apart.

The bread I used for the bowls was a loaded up variant of the basic honey-wheat bread I wrote about a few weeks ago. This is one of the great things about bread... it's really easy to successfully improvise. The nutmeg was an inspired touch, and it worked very well with the soup. That said, it did make for an odd-taste when used in sandwiches.

 Date night is tomorrow night, so I'm baking these today.

Nutmeg-Multigrain Bread Bowls:

This bread has the following ingredients:
-3 Cups all purpose flour
-2 Cups Whole Wheat flour
-2 Cups Oat Flour
-A handful of oat bran
-A handful of wheat bran
-A handful of quaker oatmeal
-Peel from one lemon, grated
-1 Tsp salt
-1 Tsp Nutmeg
-1/4 Cup or more of honey
-a little bit ( 1Tbsp? I didn't measure) of black strap molasses*
-3 Tbsp melted butter
-around 2.5 cups of warm water.



It's a nice, dense dough, full of all kinds of wholesome stuff. It's a little sticky at first, because there's a lot of water. Oat flour and oatmeal are known for being absorbent, so this does go away.

Follow normal bread-making recipe procedure. But instead of forming two big loaf, form the dough into 4 ball shapes. Then let them rise, and put them into the oven.

To be continued...

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*Black strap molasses is not to be confused with regular molasses. The first time I ever heard of black strap molasses, no kidding, was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. This pretty much guaranteed that I would end up seeking it out. I'm glad I did: Black Strap is really healthy. It's basically the by-product of making sugar, and it's loaded with nutrients and minerals. Only 2 tsp of Black strap provides 13.3% of the recommended daily dose of iron, 12% of calcium, 14% of copper, 18% of manganese, 9.7% of potassium, and 7.3% of magnesium. All of these things are important and good for you. If White sugar is pure calories that's been stripped of anything healthy, Black strap is the dumping ground for sugar's missing nutritional value. And it tastes great in morning coffee.

Basic Bread, Part Three: A good first loaf

This is a recipe I came across in a book on bread making. It's simple, to the point, and has awesome, abundant flavor. It's also a whole wheat bread, which helps with flavor, and with glycemic load. The ingredient list is a little more involved than basic white bread, but the process is just as simple.

Ingredients:
-3 Cups all purpose flour, plus extra for kneading
-3 Cups Whole Wheat Flour
-2 Tsp salt
-1 package (or 2 1/4 Tsp) of quick acting dry yeast
-1-2 Tbsp grated lemon peel
-1/4 Cup Honey
-3 Tbsp Shortening (I use Melted butter... no trans-fat issues.)
-2 Tbsp Brown Sugar (for priming)
-2 1/4 Cup of warm water

The only prep work that really needed to be done to an ingredient was to the lemon peel. I saved the peel from the lemon that I squeezed into last night's dinner for the bread I made today. After a day of drying out a bit, I was able to pull out the seeds and the remaining pulp. I cut out the stem and any other undesirable parts, and tossed the rind into the food processor with the mixing blade. I pulsed it a few times to help break it up, and then just left the machine on. The rind bounced around and got cut into hundreds of pieces. Good enough for me.

The first part of the bread making process is something called priming or proofing the yeast. The process is simple: throw the yeast into a glass of warm water, with the brown sugar. Very soon, if the yeast isn't too old, you should see signs of vigorous activity, in the form of foam on top of the mixture. In this case, it took about 10 minutes to get a small pile of foam going.

While the yeast is proofing, mix up the flour and the salt. I used a whisk to blend the two types of flour and the salt together, to make sure that they were evenly mixed. The other reason to do this is to fluff up the flour a little bit, to help it move around and mix well. It makes for a lighter end product, whether it's bread, cookies, or whatever.

Once the yeast is ready, it's time to make the dough. Pour the yeast mixture, the rest of the (Warm) water, the lemon, honey, and melted butter into the mixing bowl with the flour, and mix with a wooden spoon for a minute or two. The dough should come together pretty quickly, and once it's solid enough to work with, it should be dumped out onto a clean, floured work surface, to be kneaded.

Some bread books will advocate adding ingredients slowly as the dough is being mixed. I don't. Mixing the dry ingredients early on ensures that there won't be lumps and pockets of one thing or another. Kneading the dough will help mix everything else in, and there's nothing wrong with kneading the dough for a while if you feel like it. It's a lot easier, and more rewarding, to work with kneadable dough on the counter than it is to mix a sticky mess in a bowl.

Keep the extra flour handy as you're kneading the dough. Keep the dough from sticking to the work surface. As you knead the dough, if you feel like it's too sticky, add some flour. Throw it on the work surface to add it in: the dough will take up what it needs to get to where it needs to be. If the dough is too dry, add a little bit of water. If you've never handled dough before, it takes a bit of time to get a feel for how it "should" be. It should start to feel slightly elastic after a couple of minutes.

Once the dough has been thoroughly kneaded, (10 minutes or so) roll it into a ball, and cover it with a clean dish towel for the initial rise. I recommend adding a little more flour to the work surface before you do this. Or, if it's cold-ish in your kitchen, (this being October and all) put the dough in a lightly oiled wood or plastic bowl before covering it up. I specify those materials because metal or glass will conduct heat away from the dough and cool it down, which isn't good for bread dough. Let the dough sit for 20 minutes or so. (This is a good opportunity to clean up the tools you used earlier, in particular the mixing bowl, so it doesn't get encrusted with dried out bits of dough.)

After the initial rise, cut the dough in half, knead each piece a little bit, to get out some of the bubbles. This helps mix things up just enough to put the yeast back in touch with new, untapped pockets of food. You may notice that the dough has become more elastic as the gluten chains have formed. Let the dough sit for a minute or two, and then shape each lump into a ball, ("boule," is the bread term) tucking ends and edges underneath. Then set the boules aside, covered, and let them rise at room temperature for an hour or two... the goal is for the dough to double in size. If your kitchen is really warm, keep an eye on the dough; the yeast will be very active, and you don't want the dough to rise too much. Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees towards the end of the rise.

Once the dough has gone through the second rise, put it on a baking sheet, and put it into the oven. Turn the oven down to 400 degrees, and bake for 30-40 minutes. After this, pull the bread out, and move the loaves from the baking sheet to a cooling rack.

Warm, fresh bread is hard to beat. Even bad home-made bread is generally much better than store-bought. But either way, keep practicing. More practice will help you to learn what dough should feel like, how long it should rise, and give you a sense of what 'normal,' bread making should feel like. Gradual refinements will come with experience, and application of the scientific method. I've read of bakers who record everything: kitchen temperature and humidity, oven temps at various stages of baking, weight of the ingredients and the resulting dough, and so on... and in observing all of these variables, they begin to understand more about what's going on, and what contributes to better bread.

Basic Bread, Part Two: The Process

Making bread is a lot different from making most things. There's not much to it, but the process does take a lot of time. It's probably better to make bread when you have something else to do, too.

To give you an idea of what I mean, this was what happened as I made bread tonight:

-I mixed the yeast in with the sugar and water to prime. Then I went to go get laundry.
-I mixed the dough, kneaded it, and covered it for the first rise. Then I made dinner for tonight.
-I cut the dough in half, kneaded it a bit more, and covered it for the final rise. Then I ate dinner, cleaned up a bit, folded laundry, and put laundry away.
-I put the two loaves into the oven, and then went and wrote the first chunk of Basic Bread: part one.
-Finally, I pulled the bread out of the oven, took pictures, and finished part one.

As I mentioned in Part One, the basic science involves yeast reproducing in a pile of dough, which is made of flour and water, yeast, and whatever else you feel like adding in. Sourdough, which is a good traditional way of making bread, starts with something called sourdough starter (or a "mother"), which is basically a container of a flour and water mixture, with active yeast growing in the mix. The basic sourdough recipe calls for flour, water, a little bit of salt, and some sourdough starter. (which, again, is basically just flour and water, with live yeast growing in it.) Kneading the dough helps form gluten, which is the elastic substance that allows bread to rise, as it swells up due to the gases produced internally.

The first step in breads made with store-bought (quick-rising) yeast is to prime (or proof) the yeast. To do this, mix the yeast into a glass of warm water with some sugar. It kick-starts the process of reproduction, so that the yeast is active before it's even mixed into the dough. It also helps to let you know, before you make the dough, if the yeast is any good. If it's too old, and most of the yeast is dead, it won't reproduce, and the bread won't rise.  It's important to know, before you go any further, that your dough is going to rise. If the yeast doesn't start to reproduce, you have time to go get more yeast if you haven't mixed the dough yet. If you just add old yeast to the mix without proofing, you may be waiting a long time for the dough to rise.

Once the yeast is happily reproducing, the bread dough is mixed, and then kneaded for around 15 minutes. Kneading bread dough is a simple thing, but it's pretty frequently misunderstood. Kneading bread helps to mix the ingredients, but it also helps the flour to form gluten chains. Proper kneading stretches the dough out, and helps those chains form, which adds to the elasticity of the dough. Basic kneading is as follows: Flatten and roll the dough up a bit in one direction, and then flatten and roll from the last roll.

I've read advice to slap the dough around, and slam it down on the table, to help really stretch it out. This is good with more elastic doughs, like sourdough. For basic sandwich bread dough, which has a finer texture due to the presence of shortening or butter, is less stretchy, and doesn't really demand such violent handling. But the same source also advised to do all the kneading with one hand, so that the other remained clean enough to handle anything else that requires a clean hand. (Like the phone, or taking pictures. This is helpful advice if you can do it. Proper kneading can be a lot of work. I'm a woodworker with strong meat-hooks for hands, and it's hard for me sometimes. But I can say that it has helped to have a clean hand available from time to time.

After that, it gets covered, and left alone for about 20 minutes, for its initial rise. Put more simply, you give the yeast time to reproduce within the dough. One yeast cell splits into 2 yeast cells, into 4, and so on. The three main products of this reproductive process are carbon dioxide (CO2), alcohol, and more yeast cells. In bread, there's not enough alcohol produced to notice, and it bakes off anyway when the bread goes into the oven. But as the yeast cells multiply in an exponential fashion, and each of them is giving off more and more CO2, the dough begins to grow larger, resulting in gas pockets like these ones, which were produced during the initial 20 minute rise of tonight's loaves.

After the initial rise, the dough is cut in half (for 2 loaves) and then each lump is kneaded a little bit more, before being shaped into a ball, or loaf-shaped lump. The dough gets covered again, and left to rise for a certain amount of time, usually specified in the recipe. Some recipes call for the dough to sit in the refrigerator for a few hours, to help slow the process down and bring out more flavor. Other breads are given an hour or two for the final rise, before going into the oven.

As I said in part one, yeast needs to be kept warm if you want it to reproduce. It will generate some heat of its own in the process, but if it gets cold, it will slow down. That's why the water used to mix the dough should already be warm. For the initial rise, it's normal to cover the bread with a clean dish towel, or proofing cloth, to help insulate it and keep it warm. In cooler weather, I'll also put the rising dough in an oiled plastic bowl of some kind. I specify plastic, because it's a lousy conductor of heat. That means that if the dough is warm, it will stay warm. Metal or glass bowls will conduct the heat away, and cool the dough off, which slows the process down.

Keep the yeast warm and fed, and it will do what it does in its own time. All you have to do is wait.

Basic Bread, Part One: The Science

As with everything else, there are two kinds of people. Those who have made home-made bread, and those who haven't. Those who have can tell you that it's pretty easy. Those who haven't, seem convinced that it's a task requiring skill.

Let's start with something around the level of High School biology. Yeast is a fungus. It likes to eat, and reproduce. In fact, it's a lot like most college students in this regard.

The presence of food and warmth are basically all you need to encourage yeast to engage in reproductive activity. Again, not much different from college students.

During periods of vigorous reproductive activity, a lot of carbon dioxide is generated. And with yeast, this is also true.

Flour and water are the basics of food for yeast, but sugar works very well, too.

This is a measuring cup that has 2 heaping teaspoons of brown sugar, dissolved in warm water, with around 2 1/4 teaspoons of yeast stirred in. Watch what happens within 10 minutes.

Note the generation of a huge pile of foam-->

(Evidence of reproductive activity... yours for the viewing on the internet. Again, not unlike some college students.)





Bread is a mixture of flour and water, with yeast inside. And the yeast will continue to happily reproduce within an environment that is almost entirely composed of food.

This is the magic of bread making: Think of yeast as a bunch of college students. Provide food, and adequate warmth, and they're bound to do what comes naturally. The rest is just the process of mixing, waiting, and turning up the heat.

Think of the oven as Spring Break in Mexico. It's hotter, there's a final reproductive blowout, and then everybody gets thoroughly baked.