I recently made an incredible loaf of Farmstyle White Bread with Cardamom.  The moisture and crumb were unbelievable...maybe my best yet.  My question is, can I substitute regular milk for the instant dried milk if I reduce the amount of water?  The recipe from "The Bread Bible" by Beth Hensperger is as follows:

4 c boiling water

1-2/3 c instant nonfat milk

4 T butter

1 T salt

1 c sugar

1/2 c warm water

2 T yeast

Pinch of sugar

10 Cardamom pods (I used 1.5 tsp)

12 c AP flour

Is it possible to make bread dough the night before, leave it on the counter overnight and bake it first thing in the morning?  I would love to have fresh bread to take to work for my lunch.

I haven't done much bread baking but have done alot of reading about it and it does sound fun and good but requires a bit of pre-planning, which I'm not too good at.

Thanks

Ginny

So I was attempting to bake bread but the dough wasn't rising and wasn't rising.  Finally I realized my mistake - I used active dry yeast but treating it like instant yeast.  Would the following measures be appropriate:  1. Activate a bit of yeast.  2. Roll out the dough and spread the activated yeast all over it. 3. mix it all together. 4. Knead and see if it will rise as normal?  

The dough is currently in the refrigerator.  I like the Lesson 3 recipe, so that was the one I was making - technically I started it yesterday.  

Any and all advice is welcomed with utmost gratitude.  I loathe waste so I'd like to salvage this dough in some form or another.

Even though this website is in Italian, the photos are amazing - nice way to learn how to make different types of braided breads.

Hope it will be useful!

http://profumodilievito.blogspot.com/2009/09/trecce-di-brioche.html

I'm a new member. I'm very impressed wih the depth & degree of baking knowledge & enthusiasm here. I only wish I would have discovered you sooner. I'm much into my thin crust, neo style pizza and my Hearthkit allows me to get a carmelized crust with great crunch and interior chew in just 6 minutes. It really does add many of the benefits of a brick oven to my standard home oven. But now I want to move on to breads and I just ordered a sourdough starter from King Arthurs.

My question is this: I read great things about the positive impact from using a LaCloche type clay baker on breads re. getting good crust/color/interior w/o the need for spraying due to the retention of humidity in the baker. Frumkin, in his bread blog, raves about his LaCloche and his bread photos back it up. I've also read very good press on what the Hearthkit does for breads including some very noted bread book authors. Here's my thought...what about combining the benefits of both....using the LaCloche top over the Hearthkit surface for the first half of baking and then removing to let the Hearthkit do its magic.

Any comments pro or con from anyone who has experimented along those lines?

Tony 

Hello !  I am new to The Fresh Loaf website and would like to ask a question.  I am just beginning to get into baking bread and I see in a lot of recipes that items are measured in grams, etc.  Is there a place on the internet that will convert the grams into ounces?  thank you so much !!

Hello, everybody!

So, here in Hungary, it seems like everybody's got a farm, and coextensively a vineyard.  My husband David and I don't, but we do have an incredibly kind old neighbor who's teaching us to make our own red wine. It's so much fun - picking our own grapes, grinding them, removing stems...  Like so:

Naturally, in gratitude I've baked him lots of bread.  We're not quite done, but in approximately two weeks we will have (for $50) 150 litres of red wine!  Which leads me to my question:

I've seen and read a number of beer bread recipes.  But obviously, we've got plentiful wine...  Are there any breads which call for a splash of wine in the dough?  It seems like it would be possible, but I've never seen any; I'm still a student baker, so I don't know if there are any chemical or taste-related reason for this.  Does anybody know, and if wine bread exists, any ideas?  

Thanks!  

Erzsebet

Also, if anybody is interested in other pictures and a diary of our winemaking process, it's on my blog -http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com

My Late mother-in-law used to make something the family called "stuffed bread". It was just frozen bread dough from the store, thawed, stuffed with sausage and cheese, and baked. Last night I was charged with the task of making Stuffed Bread but with homemade bread. I decided to use the recipe for Italian Bread, because I have made it a couple of times before and found it to be delicious.

So I followed the direction in making the bread, and as it did it's two hour rise I cooked up three sausage fillings (one hot, one sweet, and one vegetarian) and got my cheese ready. I punched the bread down, let it rest for another 30 minutes, then divided it into three and ran into a little trouble. My instructions on the actual stuffing of stuffed bread were not what you might call explicit. I decided to try patting the dough into a rectangular(ish) shape, put filling on one end, and then roll the dough up starting at the filling end into a log shape. Then rest for 20 minutes, a final shaping, about an hour for the dough to double, and then the bake. (okay, so it didnt work quite that well; I realized that my oven was too small to fit all three loaves and had to bake one loaf first, and then the other two, so one was just about right and the other two were slightly overproofed when put into the oven, but they were all tasty and I was pleasantly suprised at how nice even the overproofed ones turned out.)

The only real problem I had was with the filling. With two of the loaves, the filling ended up, atleast at one end, right at the surface of the dough. It even broke through at one point on one of the loaves. The third one was a little better but the filling was still unevenly distributed and I would have liked to have fit a little more in it but dont know if I could with my current technique.

So my question is this: How might I better go about stuffing this bread?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

fem

I am a new baker.

I've been enjoying baking plain french bread.

But I find the following day the crumb is too dense for my liking.

So I looked around the web and saw people saying 'add gluten'.

So I went to my local baker/brewer shop and asked for gluten.

He first wanted to sell me a jar of liquid which I noticed was labelled 'glucose' and when I pointed that out to him he said that's the same as 'gluten', which I find a bit  hard to believe.

So then I told him how I'd come to be looking for gluten, dense crumb, internet and all and he turned around and said 'all you need is this' - and gave me some 'bread improver'.

Well sure enough, it seems to work. Makes a lovely piece of bread.  But it's not gluten and I wonder what it is and how healthy it is.

The label says:  Sugar, wheaten flour, emulsifier 481, mineral salt 170, soy flour, flour treatment agents 510, 300, enzyme (amylase)

 All of this stuff is not 'gluten' is it?

What is it? Is it good?

I wonder why a shop devoted to baking and brewing ('henry's brew and bake')  didn't stock gluten?

 ab  :)

I am just curious as to what the numbers signify in Caputo 00 and Flour Type 55 since I don't see any other than those two.

Betty