Bread Baking Made Easy

Looking from the title of this post, some of you may think that my article must be about tips to baking bread.  And in a way, you are right.  There are many ways bread-baking could be easier, quicker, less messy and practically hands-off.

I must admit, there will be some of us, who insisted that making bread needs to be the traditional way, ie. mixing, pounding, kneading the dough to “submission”.  One is for being very therapeutic, secondly – healthier for the maker and the consumer. And last but not least the traditional way and all those hard work would result in great tasting loaves.

For me, having watched and followed avidly bread-baking shows and using recipes to a T, I am proud to say I have put in some time to building a new skill at this direction and have had my share of success and failures.  However, I still feel some intimidation right before making them (ah.. the pressure of churning out good looking and great tasting bread – want yes, waste not!).

I mean, we really need to measure out the ingredients carefully to achieve a good product (a cup of this, a pinch of that would not do) and there are other things to watch out for too when doing this, plus time-consuming – like do the preliminary mixing and kneading first, leave it to rise and come back to work on it again.  I could  have gone on and on, that I wistfully wished that I could somehow put the steps all into automatic mode.  Or at least semi-automatic mode while lessening the compromise on taste and healthy factor.

So I have plodded along, most of the time alone, finding out little ways to perfect the techniques and such, until I finally admitted to something big:  we do not need to possess the professional Baker’s magical hands, or their secrets to bread baking in order to churn out such wonderful and healthy loaves.

None! Really… we can be off to a good start by using the device called the Bread Maker or Bread Machine.

No more trying to find the secret professional chefs and bakers won’t tell you, the secret they guard so jealously.  That even if you look over their shoulder when they are doing it, you still won’t be able to produce fantastic results as theirs.

But from what I experience, a bread maker can assist you to be up to par with the best of them.

From mixing the ingredients to determining when to release the yeast, baking your loaf and how long to keep it warm before we get to them are very big pluses for me.

There is so much more I would like to share with you regarding bread baking using the bread maker, so check out the next post!