Bread Making Just Got Easier

Both Amy and I have tried our hands at making home made bread over years and have had some decent results. Amy’s zucchini bread was exceptionally good this year with our home grown zucchini. Although we really enjoy home-made bread, and like the idea of knowing all the ingredients, it has been a chore to make the standard type breads (white and wheat for regular use) using our Sunbeam mixer. While the Sunbeam does the initial mixing of ingredients just fine, it just can’t handle the kneading, and its something that neither of us enjoy doing by hand.

We’ve been considering getting a nice KitchenAid mixer for about a year now. Along with the ability to knead bread doughs, we like the idea of using the attachments to process our garden vegetables. I am particularly interested in the Fruit and Vegetable Strainer to make tomato sauce with all of those beautiful Roma Tomatoes, and Amy would sure put the Slicer / Shredder attachment to good use making our salads.

We can’t afford to get the attachments right away, but we finally bit the bullet and ordered our stand mixer last week. The KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus Stand Mixer arrived yesterday just before Amy got home from work, so I had just enough time to get it unpacked, inspected, and washed before she arrived. We dove right in and started mixing like mad people .

I started the mixing session by making up a batch of Alton Brown’s Pizza Dough. This is the recipe that really put me on the side of making the purchase as it took me 40 minutes to knead the dough the last time I made it. The KitchenAide pulled it off without a hitch and the kneading was done in about 15 minutes. We ate the pizza this evening and it was pretty tasty. I wish we’d have taken pictures.

Amy then made some Honey-Whole Wheat bread, from the recipe on the back of the Gold Medal whole wheat flour bag, that turned out very nicely. The first time that Amy made this she mixed it with a spoon and then kneaded by hand and although the bread turned out great, it was a lot of hard work.

We finished the baking night by making a couple of loaves of Rustic Italian bread. I’ve made this once before and while it’s not as difficult as the Whole-Wheat it was a breeze this time with the stand mixer.

The texture on both types of breads was the best we’ve had so far. It’s difficult to say that they Pro 5 Plus was entirely responsible as we also made a change in the bread flour we used. We splurged a little and bought some King Arther Bread Flour.

Update March 3rd:

I just wanted to add one picture instead of creating a new post. I made up another batch of white bread and made up another Italian (Ciabatta) and a French (Baguette) loaf. Although there are lots of variations in the way that many people make these bread, they are essentially the same ingredients and differ mainly in shape.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.