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.

[parudox]

There's also no-knead bread techniques for the combination of both lazy and traditional bread-making.

[winged_spirit]

Ooh, I should get a rice cooker...

[lost_luck]

As much as I lurve my rice-cooker, it's not that hard to rinse/boil it manually. It's a good habit if you haven't already been corrupted.

The biggest advantage of manual boil is that rice-cooked rice retains a lot of starch, which is sadtimes healthwise.

Then again my family makes assloads of rice for the week and we fridge it. Some people find this gross (don't try it with rice-cooked rice, probably because of the starch) but I think they are crazy.

[winged_spirit]

I am uber-fail* when it comes to rice, so the less work I have to do, the happier I am.

*Liek srsly. Apparently my rice cooking defies physics.

[parudox]

I found it not that hard? Maybe I'm doing it wrong...: Rice + water in 2:3 volume ratio, heat to near boiling, lower heat, close most of the way with a lid (so pretty low heat), and come back in 20 minutes.

The easier and less proper way is to just boil rice in much more water than you need, and then to strain off the rest when it's cooked.

[parudox]

Check out cheap microwave ones (though they are plastic). Really easy to use: mix rice and water, close lid, microwave for 20 minutes.