Want to make homemade bread but can’t stand touching flour? Perfect tool for sensory issues (yours or kids’)

I keep forgetting to write about this and I SHOULDN'T, because this is a very cool product that I’m excited to tell you about.

I actually bought this on impulse and didn't expect to like it so much, but I really believe it offers an interesting solution for some people (not everybody).

Do you adore getting your hands into a fresh, powdery batch of dough?  If so, maybe this post isn't for you.  This post is for people who LOVE fresh bread, but HATE getting flour on their hands. 

You know – like this:

(if that picture, with all those floury fingers, makes you uncomfortable, you NEED to read on!)

Powdery textures usually make me nuts (sand!!!), although for some reason, I'm okay with flour and bread-making.  But I have known a few people who are totally NOT okay with it, and for them, this product might be ideal.

So… what is it?

It's a silicone dough bag!  I saw these a while ago, first on Amazon and then on AliExpress, my preferred get-things-cheap-from-China site.  AliExpress is great if you don't mind waiting 2 months and even then maybe never getting whatever it is that you ordered at all.  (so, yeah, a pretty limited market)

As it happens, I buy lots of cooking stuff on AliExpress.  It saves me having to figure out what it's called in Hebrew, and the prices are waaay better.  Stuff like my cooking scale, thermometers, even spatulas.  As long as you're willing to wait what seems like an eternity.  No impulse purchases, that’s for sure.

So what is this BAG all about?

It’s made of translucent whitish silicone, but I believe you can get them in a variety of colours.

It works pretty much how you’d assume it works once you hear the words “dough” and “bag” together.  You add your regular bread ingredients, including yeast, flour, water, and whatever else, to the bag.  Then, you knead as you normally would, except you’re touching soft, velvety-textured silicone instead of dry, powdery flour.

Here’s what the process looks like, the “new-fashioned” way!

The difference between the silicone dough bag and doing this in a regular plastic bag is that the dough bag is strong enough that you really can give it a thorough kneading.  I did a batch of pizza dough earlier in the week and Naomi Rivka said, after a couple of minutes, “It’s not really mixed.”

I let her peek inside and indeed,

Granola greetings: a perfect way to start the day (dairy)

It’s sort of like alchemy, really… you take oats, which is essentially horse food, and you turn it into pure, hearty breakfast yumminess.

If you’re thinking of starting to make your own granola, this is one of those “old favourite” recipes you’ll want to keep handy.

This picture here of the ingredients highlights the truly “no-frills” alchemy of this recipe:  crafting a premium product out of all these yellow-label groceries.  (the brown sugar and a couple of other things that aren’t packed in yellow were left out of the photo)

I’ve made this granola many, many times now.  I’m still searching for a source of milk powder (skim or otherwise) in Israel, because now I miss it… a lot.  Plus, storebought granola is pretty expensive here, while oats are relatively cheap.

I was surprised the first few times that I liked it so much; I’m not a huge granola fan.  Before I made this, I tried the Artisan Bread in Five Granola (the granola is meant to be used to make yummy Granola Bread!), but to be honest, I wasn’t that inspired by it.  This one DID inspire me.

What’s the difference?

In this recipe, it’s the milk powder that MAKES the granola.  It makes the granola sort of clump together the same way Quaker Harvest Crunch does – delicious clusters of pure homemade crunchy deliciousness.  If you don’t have powdered milk or don’t want to make a dairy granola – ie, for baking – then stick with the ABin5 recipe; it’s very good.  Otherwise, try this one – it’s GREAT!

I recommend that you not double the recipe.  The single one makes a decent quantity, and it doesn’t keep long.  Plus, my family gets sick of eating the same thing surprisingly quickly.  This is so fast to throw together that you can always whip up more if it vanishes.  (If you have a big family, I suppose you could double it, but keep in mind that you’ll need to spread it out flat to bake properly in the oven.)

This recipe is adapted from The Tightwad Gazette.

What you need:

The Wet Stuff:

• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 vegetable oil
• 1/3 cup honey

Homeschool Matzah Bakery 5772!

One of the mamas at our homeschool matzah bake today pointed out how many calories are in matzah compared to bread – I forget, but it’s something like 4 times as many – because matzah doesn’t have all the air and water that bread does so it’s just pure calories.

Which got me thinking – it’s  astonishing how much flour today’s baking wasted… or, if you don’t want to think of it as waste, because everybody was learning and having fun, at least how INEFFICIENT matzah baking is.

Each kid started with a cup of flour and 1/3 cup of water.  There were six kids, plus I had two cups of flour, which makes 8 cups of flour altogether. 

If I’d made BREAD with 8 cups of flour (about 1080g), it would be enough for at least two big loaves.  In fact, I made two 680g loaves yesterday with 877g of flour, and I had dough to spare at the end of the evening.  Just one of those loaves would have fed everybody here for lunch quite handily.

As it was, out of those eight cups, we had barely enough matzah for lunch – each kid made two big matzahs, and they didn’t eat it all, but because the mamas were also eating lunch, all the matzah was gone by the time the shmearing was done.  Eight cups worth of dough (granted, one matzah burnt beyond recognition – yet another inefficiency!).

It didn’t help that (once again, according to last year’s post), the dough was too wet.  That meant I couldn’t roll it out super-thin, which not only makes “more” matzah – ie more surface area – but also creates more PALATABLE matzah, since thinner = crispier and easier to eat.

Anyway, just thinking about this made me realize that although matzah prices seem exorbitant, these inefficiencies of matzah baking probably extend somewhat to the larger-scale operations that make it professionally.

In other news, I had a brilliant idea for a “chometz museum,” which I set up to showcase the five different grains (wheat, oats, barley, rye, spelt) with which matzah can be made, in their various forms (well… I ran out of spelt, and I wasn’t going to buy more two weeks before Pesach just for this occasion).  I also had separate dishes for kitniyos “grains” – rice, corn and beans – so the kids could pass them around and touch and feel them.

Today’s Project: Whole Lotta Bread!

This is the Pumpkin-Oatmeal No-Knead Bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (which I still don’t own!). It’s a fun bread because it doesn’t taste like a “healthy” bread (being mostly white flour), but does contain token quantities of rye, whole-wheat and oat. It is a very easy bread to make, despite the sloppiness of the final dough.

I baked these seven loaves, along with gingerbread and shortbread cookies, to fill up holiday parcel boxes whicih we mailed to members of our extended families. (actually, the 7th was for our supper: shhh…)

I added cranberries and lightly toasted walnuts to make it into more of a “festive” bread.

Anyway, ours was delicious with tomato soup this evening; soft and fresh. Almost too soft, I hope, because, this being Thursday, the others won’t arrive at their new homes until perhaps Monday.

This particular loaf is one that would be delicious slightly stale and toasted, so I was hoping that even if the loaves aren’t completely fresh when they arrive, they will still be a nice treat.

But here, I must whisper a shameful, awful truth that may doom the whole exercise to failure: the loaves were not completely cool when we mailed them. It was 4:30, Ted was hanging around getting antsy, wanting to run to the post office, and I was also getting worried that we would miss out on shipping them today altogether.

So I wrapped them, quite well, in my opinion, and sent them out the door. For wrapping, I wrapped each loaf in a layer of paper bag (paper “sleeves” made from two huge paper bags), then a large-sized ziploc freezer bag.

But now I am worried that the loaves will be terrible as a result of not being fully cool. The outside was cool, but the insides were still a bit warm. I’m scared that they’ll turn moldy in transit. Ick, what a nightmare!

Six Word Saturday: 14 Kislev, 5771

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! 

Time to dust off the sourdough!

No excuses… life is as “back to normal” as it’s gonna get, and there’s no reason I can’t bake good bread this week!

(plus, now that I used up the last of the spelt, I have some nice whole wheat flour my sister gave me last week… and some rye to use up and some oat flour and… OMG, Pesach is coming!!!)

Yummy sweetie bread!

This was yesterday’s bread component of a bread-and-soup meal.  In the morning, I mixed up the oatmeal-honey bread from 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads: No-Knead, One Bowl, to bake in the afternoon. 

I wanted to do something a little MORE with it than just a straight loaf, so I decided to do a filled, swirled raisin loaf. 

Oh – I was proud of myself; I didn’t have brown sugar for the swirl, so I took white sugar and used the mixer to beat in a couple of blobs of molasses… the result was identical.  While I was mixing, I beat in a bit of butter and cinnamon as well.  Spread it on the loaf, sprinkled with raisins, rolled up, allowed it to rise, then baked it. 

As you can see, I knew there was a problem as soon as I took the loaf out of the oven.  The seam of the swirl hadn’t been on the bottom, or shifted during rising, and suddenly, I had buttery raisin glop goobering out of the bread and even a bit over the side of the pan.

 

Definitely asymmetrical – not the most beautiful swirl loaf ever, but this was my first attempt.  Oops!

It was very, VERY yummy however.  Hit all the “cinnamon bun” buttons with a fraction of the calories.  The oats were not noticeable in the final bread, but gave it a softness and sweetness that definitely sang out “cake.”

And it was all only slightly surreal served alongside the “main attraction,” which was broccoli soup!!!  The kids couldn’t believe I was giving them dessert for supper… still; they can’t all be dense, underbaked super-sprouty experimental spelty wheat loaves.

How does this happen?

It’s a fast day today and I decided to make a nice grainy bread like Ted likes for the end of the fast.

So how does it happen that when I sit down to Google a nice, fairly quick, easy grainy bread to use up some of the ingredients I have on hand: barley flour, oat flour, bread flour, a bit of Pioneer Village whole wheat… I end up falling DEEPLY in love with a Sicilian No-Knead Bread, totally different from what I set out to bake???

I have been obsessed with Pane Siciliano for a while. For whatever reason, I love pasta and semolina and everything related to it.

This bread is actually made with durum flour, which is a finer grind than durum semolina. Semolina is coarser, like corn meal. It works for bread in small quantities, and actually works well for pasta. I also keep it on hand because, like corn meal, it’s useful for sprinkling on a surface so breads don’t stick: the coarse grains act like ball bearings and your bread rolls right off!

I haven’t been able to find proper durum flour locally, but the comments after the recipe say that Indian brands of chapatti flour are basically the same thing. In fact, the author specifically mentions “Golden Temple Durum Atta Flour,” which is exactly what I happen to have on hand. Yay for me and my poori craving!

So this helps clear up some of the confusion I’ve had about flours for pasta vs bread, durum vs semolina vs… well, whatever.

In addition to the semolina obsession, I have been fascinated with the appealing look and concept of the sesame-seed sprinkling on top of proper pane siciliano – not to mention the beguiling S-shape it’s often formed into.

Finally, this recipe called to me because it uses barley malt. It actually calls for syrup, which I don’t have, but the comments say that the powder should work just fine. My sister gifted me with a big bag of barley malt powder, which has been in the basement freezer for way too long. But it looked and smelled just fine when I took it out, so I substituted 2 tablespoons for the 1 tablespoon of syrup called for.

Since it’s for tonight, I don’t have the time to let it sit and rise for 18 hours like the recipe calls for. I plan to add extra yeast (gasp!) to compensate.

So there you have it: I have taken a perfectly lovely recipe and am now going to butcher it and see what comes out the other end. Stay tuned for pictures!!! Or else a depressing, grim tale of failure… and either will be super-entertaining, right?

p.s. I really need a Danish Dough Whisk!!! It looks waaay cool when the guy in the video stirs his dough with it!

Crunchy Granola (Bread!)

Sadly, not a rave.

I don’t love dried fruit and I guess was hoping this homemade granola and the accompanying granola bread (both from Artisan Bread in Five, which went back to the library yesterday) (an “adapted” version of the recipe is here if you’re interested; it looks the same as the original to me) for which it was made would somehow transcend all of that and make me love it. It didn’t. (if you followed the sentiment despite all the parentheses) (don’t bother).

The bread was good. So good I gave half a loaf, hot n’ fresh, to my sister. But Ted talked me into using dried cherries in the granola; they were too big and weird. And I guess I’m just not a “bits and pieces” gal.

However, the granola did get rave reviews. (the online recipe is slightly different; it includes sunflower seeds, which the book’s recipe does not)

Naomi couldn’t get over the fact that I actually made cereal! And after years of aspiring to “crunchy-granola” status, I can finally remove the quotation marks.

I didn’t try it in milk, but it did taste lovely as a snack; very much fresher than store-bought granola. Probably less sugar and fat, too. (But, in a whisper: but… I love Quaker Harvest Crunch because it is SO sweet and I love the way it clumps in the bowl.)

The day I made this, the littles ate granola for breakfast, granola bread for lunch… and again for supper. Without a single complaint!

The bread itself was pretty much enjoyed by everybody (okay, Elisheva complained a bit; don’t remember about what). I subbed whole-grain spelt for the 1.5 cups of whole-wheat. I suspect Ted kind of believes everything that tastes cinnamony is a little bit good for you; this bread is definitely more up his alley than mine.

Here’s what it looked like inside: a perfectly-risen loaf. The book mentions a granola topping, so I sort of threw some granola at it before it went in the oven. Naturally, it didn’t really stick (though a few raisins puffed up & burnt - blah).

This site (where the recipe is also posted) says the book mentions the granola topping but doesn’t say what to do with it. Apparently that’s just one of many “too-late-it’s-already-printed” errors in the print version of the book. Anyway, the solution I could have figured out if it wasn’t 7 am when I baked this is: EGG WASH. Doh!

The bread’s colour looks a little ripply in the photo, but I promise it wasn’t that glaring in real life. There may have been a few “patches” of white and patches of spelt (I was tired when I was stirring it together, so didn’t premix the dry stuff like a good girl) but they weren’t visible in normal light and it didn’t affect the flavour or texture.

In conclusion! I might make the granola again; I might make granola bread again, without the fruity stuff. But maybe not… I can’t see that the nice “roasted” flavour from the granola added much that a bit of maple syrup and vanilla in a regular oat-bread dough couldn’t – a little more easily.

Artisan Bread in Five B(oat) Bread

New bread book from the library! Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking, by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.

I have been baking from this book – especially the challah recipe, which I’ve been tweaking for better workability – for months now, so it already feels like an old friend.

I came this close to buying it in Chapters a few weeks ago, and decided not to because it doesn’t really include very many recipes. However, sitting down with it, I’m sort of starting to rethink that decision… I think this one may be a keeper.

Now that I have it in my hands (not literally; I had to put it down to type) I’m finding I do love the happy, balanced tone of the book itself – above and beyond its core formulae (of which there are more than I’d originally estimated, however).

I like the fact that most of the recipes are non-dairy, though some do include milk and butter and whatnot.

Anyway, I really want to make as many of the breads as appeal to me (not all do), starting with the semolina bread, which I’ve been wanting to try anyway… however, since I decided that, I have been completely unable to find semolina flour in our regular grocery stores.

I used to buy it all the time when I made pasta, but now it seems to have vanished from the shelves. Will have to try again over the weekend. I don’t love sesame seeds, but Hertzberg and Francois say the combo of semolina and sesame is wonderful, and I think I’ll trust them and try it out the way they say.

Meanwhile, I decided to make the very blah-vanilla-looking Oat Flour Bread (p. 104). Well, I wanted to make the Oatmeal Bread (p. 94), but it looked too involved, and I was tired, so I decided to just chuck a cup of rolled oats into the Boring Oat Bread and call it a day.

Except the Oat Bread calls for oat flour, and I forgot until halfway through mixing it that what I’d bought was barley flour (the store had no oat flour, so I figured I’d find another recipe). I should call this blog “The Distracted Chef” because yes, when shopping with children I forget what I’ve bought, and when baking with children, I forget what flours I have on hand.

So I made (b)oat bread! The B is for Barley, which I substituted for the one cup of oat flour called for. I used bread flour because we were out of all-purpose, cut down the flour by one cup and dumped in the cup of rolled oats to liven it up.

What else? Oh, yeah, while I was massacreing the recipe, I added 1/4 cup of maple syrup because the Oatmeal Bread calls for 1/2 a cup and it sounded yummy, but we only had 1/4 cup left in the house; I reduced the water accordingly.

So throw it all together at 8:00 a.m., stir it up, rise it for 2 hours, fridge it for 4 hours, and what do you get…?

Well… GREAT bread! Amazing!

The barley and maple syrup gave the bread such a lovely, soft sweet taste and texture.

Soft means this bread is very hard to slice when hot…but reasonable once cooled. I made grilled cheese with this bread today for the little kids’ lunches.

The rolled oats disappeared completely, by the way; I could feel them with my fingers when I was forming the loaves, but there was no trace of them on my tongue when eating the bread.

So there you go. Sometimes you work hard and the bread flops… and sometimes you just throw a few things in a bowl, stir it around, and end up with Very Good Bread.

The super-nice thing is that the recipe made enough for three loaves… I baked up two last night before supper (served it with lasagna), and saved one to bake tonight so we will have fresh bread for the kids tomorrow morning. Yay, me!