Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [4]
If I saw my teenage daughter reading this today, I would gently remove it from her hands and suggest that she go to the library and find herself something energizing and appropriate for a girl her age, like Wifey or Scruples.
This is not to say I don’t think that making bread is a worthwhile pastime. I emphatically do. I’ve made almost all of my family’s bread for the last fifteen years but I don’t equate bread baking with a higher morality or the eternal feminine. And I will attest that you don’t need to look like a Vermeer to make bread. You can look like an R. Crumb and smoke Parliaments while drinking Sanka spiked with Jim Beam, and still bake amazing bread. It’s one of the easiest ways to upgrade (and sabotage) your diet while saving a little money. Moreover, it takes less time to mix bread dough than drive to the supermarket, and you won’t run into anyone you don’t want to see. I have often baked bread for this very reason.
EVERYDAY BREAD
I make this straightforward bread once a week, sometimes twice. It has a hard, chewy crust and the texture of a peasant loaf, but you bake it in a pan, which makes it more tidily sliced for sandwiches. Though I’ve changed it significantly, the recipe is originally from the British cookbook Moro.
For a while I felt I should bake all our bread—that it was spendthrift and lazy not to. I didn’t want my husband to buy bread, even when we ran out, and I got snippy when he did. But I also got snippy when he’d remind me that we were running out of bread—I felt like I was being nagged to put on my apron. I think everyone in my family is glad I’ve stopped wearing that particular hair shirt. Homemade bread is better but still: it’s just bread.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Can you stir? You can make this bread.
Cost comparison: Homemade: Less than one dollar a loaf, including fuel to heat the oven. A 1-pound loaf of levain bread made by Acme, a local artisanal bakery, costs $5.50. A loaf of Sara Lee classic 100% whole wheat: $4.39.
Neutral vegetable oil, for greasing
1 teaspoon instant yeast
3½ cups whey from making yogurt or water, at room temperature
5½ cups all-purpose flour
1¾ cups whole-wheat flour
⅓ cup flaxseeds (optional)
4 teaspoons kosher salt
1. Oil the inside of two 9 by 5-inch metal loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl, mix the yeast, liquid, flours, seeds (if using), and salt. Scrape the dough into the pans. Drape with a clean, damp dish towel and let rise for about 2 hours until level with the tops of the pans. Many recipes specify plastic wrap to cover rising bread; I don’t use it because a) it’s plastic and b) it never stays in place. Occasionally this dough rises extra high and sticks to the towel; just pull it off the best you can. If the prospect of this bothers you, cover with lightly oiled plastic wrap instead.
3. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
4. Bake loaves for 30 minutes.
5. Remove the bread from the pans, return to the oven, and bake directly on the rack for 15 minutes more. The bread is done when it is richly colored and sounds hollow when tapped.
6. Ordinarily, you should cool bread before slicing, but a hot, crispy heel of this bread is too delicious to forgo, especially with butter. Store in a paper bag for up to a week. For longer storage, wrap tightly and freeze.
Makes 2 loaves
YEAST
These recipes all call for instant yeast. If you bake bread even just a few times a month, you should absolutely order your yeast in bulk from King Arthur Flour (see Appendix). Supermarket yeast costs as much as $4.50 per ounce. A one-pound sack of instant yeast from King Arthur costs $0.75 an ounce, including shipping. A pound is a lot of yeast, but you’re far more likely to bake if you have abundant cheap yeast in the refrigerator. I decant my yeast into a clean quart jar and it has so far never gone bad on me.
BUTTER
I was very proud of my