Week 3 - Bread: White Loaf

I love home made bread but I have always made it using my bread maker. It will be interesting to see if I can get this weeks white bread loaf to rise successfully making it by hand.

The Dough

Making the dough was quite straight forward as I just had to mix the bread flour, salt, yeast and lukewarm water to form a soft dough.
Then I kneaded the bread by hand for 10 minutes. The recipe told me to knead the dough by stretching the ball of dough away from me like an elastic band while holding the other end of the dough down with my hand. Then the dough was gathered back into a ball and the whole stretching movement started again. This style of kneading was not tiring at all and the 10 minutes passed quite quickly. In fact I found kneading the dough to be quite relaxing as it gave me 10 minutes of time where my brain could just drift and think about things.

My kneaded dough ready to go into the airing cupboard

Once the kneading was complete I put my ball of dough into the airing cupboard and left it for an hour. Once the hour was up I checked on my dough and it had risen beautifully to double its original size. I was very excited to see that the dough had actually risen as my previous attempts at making pizza dough had not gone well as it would never rise no matter how long I would leave it!

The risen bread dough

I then split the risen dough ball into two equal portions. The loaves were then left to double in size for another hour at room temperature.

The two risen loaves after being left for an hour

Once risen the two loaves where ready to go into the oven. I decided to split one of the loaves into 4 rolls as then I would be able to freeze them as my husband and I were not going get through two bread loaves before they went stale.
The "How to Bake" book told me to preheat the oven to Gas Mark 8 for when the bread first goes into the oven. My gas oven is a little temperamental when it comes to temperature so when I put the rolls onto the bottom shelf the baking paper caught alight as the gas flames were so strong. I managed to blow out the flames and thankfully no damage was done to my rolls only alot of charred baking paper!!!
So that I was going to be able to cook my bread without setting any more things on fire I decided to turn my oven down to Gas Mark 6 which made the gas flame much smaller.
After 15 minutes I rotated the baking trays so that both sets of bread browned nicely. It took 30 minutes to cook the bread so that they where a nice golden colour and sounded hollow when tapped on the bottom. When I took the bread out of the oven I felt a real sense of achievement that through my labour, I had managed to produce such good bread without any help from the bread machine.

My bread loaf

My bread rolls

The Verdict

The bread had a lovely thick crust with a light springy centre and it tasted amazing. The "How to Bake" book says that this recipe will make the perfect white loaf and I can certainly agree with that.
This weeks challenge has shown me how easy it is to make bread by hand and I aim to continue making bread by hand instead of just pressing the start button on the bread machine.

Next Week's Baking Challenge:

Beef and Red Wine Pie with Shortcrust Pastry