The only hard thing about baking bread is remembering how
easy it is. Today I made St. Michael’s bread from the book Recipes from the Portuguese of Provincetown. By the way, I see this book is available
for small money from Amazon.
This is my go-to bread recipe, but it has been modified over
the years. It calls for dissolving a
yeast cake in warm water in which you also dissolve two tablespoons of
vegetable shortening. I always used
Crisco. You wanted the water to be warm enough to dissolve the Crisco, but if
you got it too hot, you would kill the yeast.
It was always a cliff-hanger to see if the dough would rise.
I’ve made some notes in my old cookbook. I now use instant yeast, which I buy it King
Arthur Flour.
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/saf-red-instant-yeast-16-oz
It comes in quite a large package, but it keeps in the
freezer. My notes say a scant tablespoon
equals a package of yeast, which long ago substituted for the yeast cake. You just put it in with the dry ingredients.
There’s no need to proof it. Instead of
Crisco I now use the same amount of olive oil.
This makes yellower bread with a delicious taste that’s slightly
different from the original. I think
it’s better. Maybe the Portuguese of
Provincetown used vegetable shorting, but their ancestors in Portugal used
olive oil.
For the kneading, I use the dough hook on my Kitchen Aid
mixer. I like to knead bread, but the
dough used to start out sticky, and I hated getting the residue off the
table. It would clog a brush and ruin a
sponge. Paper towels turned to shreds no
matter what brand I used, and I ended up alternating between scraping it and
washing the surface. Now, when the dough hook has done its work, I flour the
table and knead the dough by hand for a minute or two until it forms a smooth
ball. I actually like kneading bread,
but this will do. Because it’s past the
sticky phase when I put it down, all I need to do is brush away the leftover
flour.
From experience I have learned that the recipe’s direction to
bake it for 50 minutes at 350° is too long. Today I checked it at 35 minutes. I
liked the color and the hollow sound when I thumped the bottom of the loaf. Then I checked it with an instant-read
thermometer just to make sure, and it came out to 180°, which is what I
wanted.
Now there are only two downsides to baking bread. It’s not a lot of work, but you need to be
home when it finishes each of its two risings and when it bakes. Music on the
stereo and a good book fill the wait. A
more serious problem is you’re likely to eat more bread than you should before
it even cools. 