Bread Tips and Pointers

After over a year of making bread multiple times a week, I've found some easy tips.

You can proof your dough in a pitcher- much easier to see when it's "doubled."

You can also scoop it out of the mixing bowl, spray the whole thing with PAM, and plop it back in. No cleaning necessary.

If you use another container to rise the dough in, you can easily make multiple batches of bread in one morning and freeze the unbaked loaves. It takes me about 10 minutes to go from cupboard to proofing, including grinding the wheat. Raise the dough and then punch down and form into loaves. Wrap loosely in a few layers of saran wrap and freeze. Obviously, I didn't wrap these loosely and they cooled down much slower than I anticipated. They exploded. Once I put them back together and re-wrapped, they behaved beautifully. If you made the bread at night and let it rise overnight in the fridge, that would be wonderful too. You could wrap them in the morning and pop them in the freezer.

When you want to bake one, unwrap and let it thaw completely on the counter in your loaf pan. Mine takes 3-4 hours to thaw and rise.

When the bread has reached the top of the pan, bake as normal. I find that I get a softer crust this way- the gluten has more time to develop, but it doesn't have the beer-y flavor of bread that has been risen multiple times. (I like to rise just twice, once in the bowl, once in the pan.)