What Noisy Cats Are We

I bake this in the bread machine (call it cheating if you want, I don’t care, it works and it’s low heat in the middle of the Summer) pretty often to give away.  It’s dense and has a nice, crispy crust.  Pretty good for sandwiches.  This simple little recipe and old ass Oster bread machine is what started me on my little bread baking obsession.  Now that I know a lot more than I did a year ago, I’m not interested in the bread machine as much, but it’s still there for this simple, quick loaf of bread.

My old, handwritten recipe is below.  As you can see – I was so new to the game that it’s only labeled ‘bread’ and all the measurements are in volume, not weight.  Also, scratch the vital wheat gluten.  I used to think it would help make the dough rise.  Now, there things like poolish, pre-ferment, and wild yeast that enter my mind when I think about the ‘rise’, as well as the magic ingredient: patience.

The bread machine is a basic model.  I set it for a large loaf of white bread with ‘dark’ crust.  It takes ~4 hours from adding he ingredients to smelling the baking process, to hearing the beeping and subsequently removing the loaf from the machine and placing it on the cooling rack.

The recipe consists of this:

(Add wet ingredients to the pan first):
- 1 1/3 cup water (at room temperature)
- 2 tablespoons butter (I warm mine to room temp. but it’s not absolutely necessary)
- 2 tablespoons milk (or an extra tablespoon of water and an extra tablespoon of butter)

Dry Ingredients:
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 4 cups flour (I use King Arthur bread flour, though for the purposes of this recipe, you could use all purpose flour as well
- 1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast

Once all the ingredients have been added and the machine started, I add a bit of these:
- basil
- thyme
- rosemary (more than that of the others)
- oregano
- garlic powder

Four hours later, here is what comes out:

Again – nothing fancy but it’s simple and it works.  I bake some for G’s parents whenever I know she is going to be visiting them and they love the stuff.  Also, it’s great for grilled cheese making.