For a shop project, David is making a slide-in-trailer receiver cargo rack. At school, he cut and assembled the rack. But tonight he brought it home and he and Will measured and drilled holes for bungee cords to secure the load and the holes where the hitch pin slides through. I was so glad David is getting some very useful training at school for some real-world work that can come in very handy in his future. Will also helps him with his welding and shop work, here at home. No one ever knows what the future will hold and the more marketable skills a person has, the better his chances are for a brighter future…no matter what the economy or world is doing at the time.
Readers’ Questions:
Baking in a bread machine
We recently purchased a NutriMill and have been grinding hard white wheat into flour. We also have hard red wheat but haven’t tried that yet. We’ve been baking 2 pound loafs with a bread machine on the whole wheat setting. We’ve been using a 100% whole wheat recipe from the machine’s manual; flour from the mill, water, butter, salt, gluten flour, brown sugar, skim milk powder, and yeast. Each loaf has been delicious and very consistent but each time the top “collapses” so the loaf’s top looks weird. Otherwise it’s great bread. We reduced the water for a few loaves but it didn’t have much effect. Can you recommend a recipe for using a machine to make bread from flour right out of the mill? It would be especially helpful if it used eggs since we’ve got plenty of them.
Holly A.
Shevlin, Minnesota
I’m sorry, but I have never used a bread machine. Mom used to have one, but I’ve always made bread the old-fashioned way. Maybe Ilene Duffy could help you. She’s a whiz with a bread machine. Let’s ask her! — Jackie
I can’t exactly say I’m an expert either at using a bread machine since I let the machine run its course just through the dough cycle and then take the dough out, shape it, let it rise again for an hour, and then bake it in the oven. But here are some ideas to try to see if you can get some nice loaves right out of the bread machine.
First of all, I’d try a 1 1/2 pound recipe instead of a 2 pound. Most bread books have recipes for both of these sizes of loaves. It could be that your bread machine can make a 2 pound loaf, but for this particular recipe that you’re using it just is too much dough for the machine to handle.
Another thing to try is to adjust the liquid to flour ratio as you’ve already done, but write down exactly how you’re making your adjustments so you can better tell in the future what’s working and what isn’t. You might try lessening by just one or two teaspoons the amount of liquid and with the same loaf add an extra tablespoon or two of flour, which will give you a denser bread.
Egg bread is great and I use up eggs too when I have an abundance. (Nice problem to have!) I’ve found my homemade egg breads to be more dense than loaves made with just milk and/or water. They make wonderful sweet breads when you add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the dry ingredients and later add a handful of raisins during the first mix cycle. You can also add the raisins to the dry ingredients which works fine too.
You’ve inspired me to make a nice loaf of whole wheat bread this weekend! — Lenie
Sweet limewater
Your book and articles have inspired me to try grinding my own corn for cornmeal and hominy flour. I know you like the Native American corns, but which one would you use for your hominy? Also, you said the you soak the corn in sweet limewater. What is sweet limewater? I’m looking forward to trying parched and dried corn as well. Thanks for all your insights and help. Whenever I wonder how to do something with crops or canning or something, my husband always asks “What does Jackie say?”
Carol Bandy
Hightown, Virginia
The lime you want is slaked lime (calcium hydroxide), although pickling lime will work. You can often find slaked lime at Mexican groceries, or in the ethnic section of larger stores.
My favorite corns for hominy are Cherokee White Flour corn from Seed Dreams (gowantoseed@yahoo.com) and Santo Domingo Blue from Native Seeds/SEARCH. Of course you can use just about any larger seeded dry, mature corn. Have fun! Your own cornmeal, hominy, and corn flour is SO much tastier than store-bought! (Like everything else.) — Jackie
Jackie, we thouroughly enjoy your column, as well as the entire Mag! I noted the advice you gave about pealing pears with a paring knife. Try this: We use a cheese slicer, the kind that looks like rounded off pie server, which has a slit across the widest part of the blade. We’ve peeled pumkin, potatos, rutabagas, pears, apples, squash, you name it. It’s much faster, and little risk of cutting yourself. Just be sure to buy a durable one, as the cheeper ones tend to pull apart with constant use.
I find that using a bread machine gives me very inconsistent results. I love the bread machine for mixing up the dough though. I watch it when mixing in case it needs a little more water or flour, but for the second rise I put it into a bread pan and when it is risen, bake it in the oven.
The bread machine keeps the flour from getting all oven the kitchen, does some warming to encourage the yeast to grow, and does a nice job of kneading. These are all time savers, even if I do the last part by hand.
And my wife gets upset when I leave my tools in the house while doing projects, never mind a welding project. I find it great that Davids school still offers shop classes.
About the bread machine .. I was making bread once a week using a mix that I just add yeast and water to. It also collapsed every time. I tried everything.
Finally used potato water, and mashed potatoes (thinned down with water) instead of plain water. Turned out some beautiful loaves of bread from that point on. Give it a try. I just boil potatoes till done and then pour the potato water in a jar until I need it for bread. Have it at room temp before you use it with your yeast.
To Carol in Virginia, My husband also asks me if I have “Ask Jackie”. So I do “Ask Jackie”.
“sliding the cup directly into the cup and shaking off the excess”
oops, that should be directly into the FLOUR! lol
I have made a fair amount of home-ground 100% whole wheat bread in my machines. I have found that a couple of things will cause an inconsistent rise on my loaves.
The first thing is that you have to be VERY accurate in your measuring. I’m a big fan of grabbing the cup and scooping flour in it by means of sliding the cup directly into the cup and shaking off the excess. Same with measuring spoons. Reason for all this fuss is that the machine can not deal with even the slightest changes, you have to go back to Gentle measurements. Normally bread making by hand is very general – you have the ability to change the time it rises and the time it bakes. But since the machine can not do this, you have to be totally accurate in the measuring portion of the preparation. I mean to the point of “fluffing” the flour and then using a spoon to GENTLY place it in the measuring cup and then leveling the flour with the side of a table knife scraped across the top of the cut. Using the same knife to level measuring spoons. With the liquids, you need to get down on EYE LEVEL to make sure the water is in the EXACT same spot every time. You can’t get away with glancing at it as you run the water into the cup and calling it good.
The second thing I found was that I needed to cut back the amount of yeast called for in the recipe. My recipes seem to call for about 2 1/2 tsp yeast and I usually use about 1 1/2 tsp for 3 1/2 cups of flour. That change seems to have stopped the bread from over-rising and then collapsing on top.
The third thing is to keep the bread machine in the same place under the same conditions. I found that if I move the machine to the kitchen table (in the living room – way small kitchen!) or if I move it to on top of the washer in the kitchen, I get different results than if I keep it over by the toaster oven.
Also know that humidity will play a role in this. So each time you make bread you need to check to see that the water/flour ratio is good. ON a humid day (or day you’ve been doing a lot of cooking or laundry!) the flour will have absorbed water from the air, so you will need to use a little more flour to absorb the water in the bread pan. On a very dry day (or day where the heater is running a lot and there’s no added moisture in the air), you’ll need more water to rehydrate the flour a bit.
Hope this helps.
Holly:
About the bread machine, watch the dough during the first few minutes of the kneading cycle. Most machine recipes are way off in terms of moisture-to-flour ratio, so the adjustments might have to be more drastic than the ones you’ve been making. It is ok to have the machine open while kneading, at worst you might get splashed. It takes a few tries, but after a while you’ll learn what the dough looks like when it has too much flour or not enough, and you’ll be able to add flour or water accordingly, as the dough is kneading.
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