Bread

[winged_spirit]

I may have just proved that homemade bread is cheaper than storebought
mass-produced bread (like Weston). Had a disagreement about it with Jeff
last term, but I just did the math and it should be around 25cents
cheaper. Not much, but I just wanted to prove it wasn't more expensive,
and it's much more delicious. Time consuming, but nommy.

Comments

[lost_luck]

If my kitchen could only have 3 appliances, they would be in this order, toaster oven, breadmaker, rice cooker.

Nom!

[lost_luck]

Dude, no way. Replace Breadmaker with food processor. Think about how much fun punching dough will be.

--Sinister

[lost_luck]

I'd much prefer eating the bread to making it. I'd screw stuff up! Screwing up bread = sad.
Now, hand mixing other things is exactly why I don't have a food processor. I like chopping things up!

Kneading, not so much.

[lost_luck]

Chopping is fun, but there are a number of things which require care or granularity that is sometimes best left to robots.

It's pretty hard to screw bread up. Once you figure out which breads require gluten, you're pretty golden. Also, food processors come with dough hooks/blades that take care of the dirtiest part of kneading, the forming of dough.

Instead of the traditional floured board, you can flour a large bowk and just punch the fucker. Faaar cleaner :)

The big advantage of a bread machine is the one stop nature, but a lot of it isn't that big a deal, the throwing into an oven or the sitting around of rising dough.

[anonymous]

Makes sense, esp if you buy all the ingredients in bulk. Although, you might have to account for energy costs of ovens.

Also, if you're using normal yeast, it's only about 1/2 hour per loaf. Is that a lot of time?

--Sinister

[winged_spirit]

I use traditional yeast (not quick rise) and I don't use a breadmaker. So there's the mixing of the ingredients (don't remember how long that takes, but it involves ten minutes of yeast rising and scalding milk and kneading, so could be as long as 45 minutes), first rise (45 minutes - 1 hour), punch down, wait 15 minutes, form into whatever (loaves are quick, so the time is probably irrelevant for that), second rise (45 minutes), and cook (15-30 minutes). So yeah. Time.

[anonymous]

Most of that remains idle time for the cook =)

But it is still significant if you're trying to be a bread factory (more than one batch per day)

[winged_spirit]

Idle, but aware. You still gotta be pretty much around for 3-5 hours.

Bread factory is a horrible idea :p I know from second-hand experience.