It’s simple. It’s easy. It’s wonderful. It’s… Homemade white bread, and it only took a few minutes of actual work to make perfectly the very first time.  Trust me folks, if I can do this, so can you!  if you’ve got a stand mixer with a dough hook this is as simple as it gets, it contains no preservatives and it stores well. (The loaf pictured above spent a week in the fridge… It’s still wonderful and will be finished off tonight.)

This is probably one of the tastiest bread recipes I’ve come across for everyday use.  The recipe makes two full-sized loaves and my kids think it’s got the over the counter stuff beat by miles when it comes to a good PB&J.  If you figure up the cost to make it, it’s about 1/4 the price of any loaf at your local market, but twice as good, so even the tiny bit of effort required makes this cost effective as well as delicious.

Another plus of this recipe over other is that it’s a very firm crumb and easily handles duty as a sandwich bread.  I’ve tried several recipes that simply could not hold up to the role of sandwich bread.  This loaf does not disappoint in that regard.  It’s soft enough to be enjoyable, but firm enough to stand up to everything from peanut butter to hot roast beef without crumbling or turning to mush.  In short, it’s the perfect alternative to store-bought sandwich bread.  Give it a try, you’ll like it!

And if your wondering if this is the perfect bread to make your family his Thanksgiving or Christmas, the answer is YES!  It’ll make wonderful Turkey Sandwiches!

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Popularity: 4% [?]

My boys are very interested in cooking and I have to say quite honestly that nothing in the world could make me happier.  I’m working hard to keep that interest alive, so when my son reminded me I’d promised them banana bread this weekend I decided that if he wanted it that badly, he could help make it. He was happy to oblige, even with one arm in a cast.

I may have helped with some of the more difficult parts of the recipe (like cracking eggs, which can be difficult enough for a ten year old with full use of both arms), but for the most part, this is Erik’s bread.  He even made adjustments to the original recipe to suit his tastes.  While this only included adding more nuts, it still made me very proud.

E. Did a wonderful job of following the directions even though as you can see from the collage above, he had a little bit of help from his youngest brother, which at times may have seemed like more of a bother than a help.

And how was the end result?  See for yourself:

All hail the budding chef enjoying the spoils of his labors.  I’m not sure if he would have enjoyed the bread as much as he did if he hadn’t had a hand in it.  he was proud beyond belief, to the point of calling it “his masterpiece”.

I couldn’t agree more.

What are you waiting for?  Get in the kitchen and cook something with your kids!  You’ll love every minute of it and so will they.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

I take a good deal of pride in making really good burgers.  The problem is, what’s the point of making the perfect patty, regardless of what went in to it, if you can’t be proud of the bun that it rests on?  I usually just grab some kaiser rolls and call it good, but today I decided that I’d had enough!  I was going to take some pride in my buns!  Err.. Rolls! I mean really.  How can you be a “seat of your pants” cook and not have pride in your buns?

Just in case you’ve never looked, there are as many recipes on the Internet for hamburger buns as there are for burgers, so choosing just one wasn’t easy.  There are whole wheat, artesian, gluten-free, honey glazed and so many more it boggles the mind. In the end I bowed to the fact that this recipe at allrecipes.com was the simplest of the ones I found, and I only had to adjust it a bit to fit in with what I had on hand.  Not only that, but it made a lot of buns, so there will be leftovers for egg sammiches in the morning. (Bonus!)

As for why I needed buns…  Well, you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to find out, won’t you?

(These are actually pretty good sized.  I just have really large hands!)

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Popularity: 2% [?]

“Welcome to the Daring Bakers, You are tasked with making the one thing in the world that absolutely terrifies you.”

Yup, that’s how it felt. I finally decide to go and join up with the rest of the blogging world and try this baking stuff out only to find that my three worst fears had been realized on my very first challenge.

First, I had to make bread. Bread scares me. It’s the simplest thing in the world, I mean four ingredients, that’s it. Four. But yet I have never managed to make a loaf of yeast bead that was even close to edible. No matter how diligently I worked at it, something always went wrong and I ended up with something akin to a hockey puck in the end.

Secondly, This was Julia Child’s’ Recipe! Fer Chrissakes this woman was a culinary deity. I have repeatedly lauded out love and admiration for the Grande Dame of America’s culinary consciousness on many occasions. I was already facing bread, my arch kitchen nemesis, and now I had to try to live up to Julia Child!?!? I was feeling pretty bleak by this point. To fail this recipe challenge meant failing Julia. No pressure there, eh?

Third. The rules clearly stated “No Substitutions”. GiveMeAFreakinBreak! I’m the “Seat of my Pants” Guy, remember?!? I never follow any recipe exactly, no-way no-how!

I thought about backing out of the whole DB thing right there, I really did. I knew there was no way I was going to make this work. I glanced over the nine frakken pages of recipe and sat for a while in a cold sweat. I mean, I’m not a baker! I couldn’t DO this!

And from somewhere deep in my memory came the voice of reason. A voice I had heard all my life at one time or another and in one form or another. A small voice to be sure, but the most encouraging one I have ever heard.

“Well, it seems the souffle didn’t rise as I’d expected. Don’t worry. This will come out much better when you do this at home”

It was Julia’s voice, from a guest spot on Emeril Live just about a year before her death. It wasn’t the fist time she’d said it, though. It was her mantra. She cooked, sometimes she failed. She did this in front of millions of people once a week for most of her adult life. She inspired millions by doing so. Such names as Emeril Lagasse, Cat Cora, Sara Moulton, Jaques Pepin have all been directly influenced by the powerhouse in an apron. Many more of us nameless home cooks have decided that we too could tackle that seemingly impossible recipe just because Julia said we could manage it.

I believed her then, I believe her now, and she was right.

I read, re-read and then read the recipe again. Nine pages is a lot to take in, especially for something as simple as bread, but Julia was pretty adamant about the methods involved in a traditional loaf. I bought the lower gluten flour that was recommended. I purchased a pizza stone to cook the loaf on. I got everything ready and I dove in.

NOTE: This recipe is massive. Far to massive to be printed here. For convenience, I’ve added it as a pdf file Julia’s French Bread Recipe – PDF Format, or you can check the original at the Breadchick’s Website here.

I measured carefully. I let the mixer work its magic. I hand kneaded a bit and then I waited. Precicely three and one quarter hours later the volume had tripled and I was ready to punch, so punch I did. A little knead and back in the bowl to rise again…

About this point the spirit of Julia was in me, so I popped open a bottle or port (sorry, no sherry in the house) and began happily sipping away while I worked on other projects. The dough just kept doing its thing, and two and-a-half hours later, I was ready to get this thing going.

Plop it out, cut, fold into 12 lovely lil’ pieces and wait 5 minutes. OK, time for more of that port. Unfortunately, we weren’t cooking anything I could splash the port in, so I just tipped my glass towards the bread and uttered another of my favorite Julia-ism’s “Some sherry for the sauce, and some to sauce the chef!”

OK, form up some little rounds, lay out on flour rubbed linen and cover. No problem. Back to other things for about an hour, check in and everything looks petty good, so crank the oven to 450 degrees with the stone in the top 1/3. Get a basting brush ready and sharpen the bejeebus out of a boning knife for nice clean slashes on top of my little soon-to-be buns.

With the oven hot and a pizza peel ready and liberally coated with cornstarch, lift each of the little guys and flip ‘em over. One clean slice and it’s on to the next. All 12 in the oven, door closed and brush with water every three minutes for 15 to 20. No problem

And in the end..

Perfection.

You were right Julia. This would come out better when I tried it at home. I’m glad you said it, I really am. Otherwise I would have returned to my happy cook’s world, still devoid of measuring spoons and such, and I never would have had the best bread I’ve ever eaten. I never would have decided to make it three more times over the course of the month, and I never would have thought I could.

Thanks also to the Daring Bakers and to this month’s hostesses Sarah, and the Breadchick, without whom I would not be writing this today or snacking on French bread as I type.

I suppose this makes me an official Daring Baker, so I’ll set about adding the logo to the site at some point today. To all the other daring baker’s out there, have a wonderful day!

Popularity: 4% [?]

If there is one thing that I as my wife to make more than anything else, it’s her particular take on banana bread, zucchini bread falls in at a close second. To be honest, I’m a sucker for just about any bread that features nuts or vegetables… Or beer. The combination of flavors, textures and the aroma that fills the house while these breads are baking is something that really can’t be described, but belongs in every homeowners manual under “the first thing you should do to break in your new home.”

Apparently our friend Naomia feels the same way. She’s heading off on a tour of duty in Japan, and the one thing she asked my wife to make for her before she left was banana bread. You won’t hear any complaints from me. I’m glad she asked for it, because I, as the resident food blogger, get a mini-loaf all to myself.

As a matter of course, all of our mixed, kneaded or otherwise manipulated products have been handled in our very trusty K.A. mixer. Tonight’s foray into baking got me thinking that perhaps I could use my own cooking-specific mixer. In that bent, my guy-ish instincts are pulling me towards the Hamilton Beach® Eclectrics® Mixer, mostly because it just looks cooler.

The other reason I’d prefer to have my own Hamilton Beach® Stand Mixer is that I tend to abuse my cooking equipment a bit more heavily than my wife does, and I would prefer to leave hers pastry-fresh, rather than one that has been tainted with cooking oils or other ingredients that are harmful to the care and feeding of doughs and other bakery-type stuff that I have no comprehension of.

If I had to give a third reason, it’s because the Hamilton Beach® Mixer is quieter than our existing unit. That means I can actually talk to my wife while it’s disseminating all of the things that I feed a mixer when I’m attempting something unusual. while this might play out as a dismal failure culinarily, it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like my own toys to play with.

Having said that, I’ll let you in on my wife’s recipe. Please do enjoy!

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Popularity: 1% [?]

I had originally meant to title this post “Ale Bread Part Deux”, but I really didn’t want to make it into any kind of a tribute to Charlie Sheen. (Not that I have anything against Charlie, mind you!)

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog over the last year, you’ll know that baking is one of my biggest fears and is something I usually leave to my wife, who excels at it. I have however, been prodded repeatedly by several people to “bite the bullet and bake us up something fab to drool over”

My last attempt at this resulted in something less than what I expected, even after several goes at it. It was enough to send me away from the baking cupboard in shame for quite some time, with every intention never to slink back to realms in which I obviously do not belong.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

When Lis from La Mia Cucina interviewed me, one of her questions was when I was going to stop waffling on the subject of baking and actually “…bite the bullet and bake us up something fab to drool over…”?

The answer to the question is “I did it on Monday.”

This bread is a lot more tricky to make than it looked in the directions. My wife attempted it the night before I made this, and the recipe failed her. It could be humidity levels or it could be a curse placed on my family by gypsies, but that dough was never gonna work.

The next morning I vowed that no recipe which includes a full can of beer was ever gonna whoop my beer hunting tush (my manliness was at stake here, not to mention the senseless loss of a perfectly good pale!) , so I bought a 24 oz bottle of Corona and went after a double batch. It didn’t take long to discover I was going to have to wrestle with it though.

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Mrs. seat of her Pants took the kitchen out of my control over the weekend, and with stunning results, I admit! she whipped these out Sunday Morning in lieu of the normal “fried spuds” which of course I made on Saturday.

Though we just made these to snack on, I think they would be outrageously perfect if paired with seafood, especially shellfish or chowder.

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Popularity: 37% [?]