Bread Story

Bread is a funny thing. No, maybe it isn’t. I like homemade bread. A lot. Probably my favorite meal is hot fresh bread that my mom just made with butter and honey on it, a tall glass of milk, and some home-canned peaches.

I love my breadmaker. It came with a great bread, dough, dessert, butter recipe book. It did not, however, have any gluten-free bread recipes. I never would have noticed, but one of my bffs in the world is Ali, who is deathly allergic to wheat. Sunday I was in a bread mood, and I wanted to make something Ali Friendly, something oaterrific. I made some modifications, and produced a loaf of bread with oat flour and xantham gum in place of wheat. It turned out tasty, but quite dense. So I thought, hey, maybe I need to make yeast adjustments (I made it on the quick-rise setting, because the yeast jar said I could.)

Last night I decided I wanted more bread. So I went to bake just a regular loaf. After I had all the ingredients in, but had not yet hit a button to start it, I decided to look closer at the yeast jar. Turns out it is regular yeast, and if you want it to quick-rise, you have to do fancy stuff beforehand. I thought, super, I’ll just put it on a regular mix & bake setting. But when I looked at the recipes for those loaves, they had less than half the yeast called for in the quick-rise recipes. My breadmaker is really easy to use. That means you hit about 2 buttons and it does the rest. You do not get to decide how long the dough rises, because the breadmaker is smart enough to do that for you. But the breadmaker didn’t know that I had 2 tablespoons of regular yeast in. I picked a setting that was 2 hours to the end and crossed my fingers.

Then I went about playing with my baby and doing some work. I started to smell a delicious aroma, so I went in to see if it was normal, or a hard little lump, or what. It was bursting out of the top of the breadmaker. The lid was about 3 inches up. So I opened it and started pulling hot wads of dough out and throwing them in the trash, until it was almost even with the baking pan thingy. I cleared dough off the vent, and closed the lid. For dinner I ate the edges of the top. For breakfast I had toast that had dough-ish elements, but was otherwise okay. The flavor is fine, the texture is weird. I learned a valuable bread lesson. And I’m sorry that I let AJ take the camera to Scout Camp this week, because it was a scary sight, watching that dough getting so very high.