Crusty White - perhaps

No, we haven't left our Christmas present collect dust in a forgotten corner - we've just been a bit blog-lazy. Maybe because we haven't been trying out lots of new things recently. Until now!

Well, actually, it was a couple of weeks ago when we first tried our luck with the Crusty White mix from Laucke. I've always been a bit hesitant to do the plain, old, boring, white bread but here we are. Our first attempt went so wrong that it wasn't worth documenting it (publicly). For some reason, half of the dough ended up outside the baking container and it was full of huge holes.

So this time, instead of following the recipe, Lizzy did what she does best - improvise :)
Less water (only 400ml), less yeast (only 1t), less flower (a bit) and then hand over control to the breadmaker's "French" program. The result was better but still not perfect. Here's a shot:

Still a lot of air bubbles in the top third. Maybe we'll try a different setting next time.

Taste isn't as boring as expected, so it will get another chance. It goes well with my favourite cherry jam. Mhhh :)

Burgers!

The other day we picked up a Multigrain, Soy and Linseed mix from our trusted bread mix provider Laucke on special. Unfortunately, the bread went along as an undocumented success but then we had another idea: homemade burgers!
Oh yeah.
Since the breadmaker can't bake rolls, we just used it to mix and kneed the dough on the basic setting and let the old fashioned oven do the rest. What a good feast it was

Nothing like freshly baked, warm buns to make your burger with...

Crusty Wholemeal +1

This time we put the raisins in the crusty wholemeal mix, because crusty wholemeal is better (tm).

A slight modification to the ingredients from "A little fruity":

- 1 cup of raisins

- 2 t of mixed spices

- 1 T of sugar

- 1 pinch of salt

All that together with the Wholemeal Raisin program over night and out came this:

Tasty!

Day two left the top quarter much softer than the bottom - something we often observe on second days. I wonder what the cause is. Maybe next time I'll turn it upside down...

Crusty Wholemeal

Ok, so I've given up naming my breads.

Once again, we were in for another first: Crusty wholemeal from Lighthouse
375ml of water with 600g of bread mix clearly called for the "large" option. We had some time, so the program of choice was "Whole wheat" and yet again there was no choice for the crust. 5 hours later we were hungry for some steaming goodness.

As always it tasted best when still warm - one day we'll figure out how to make the crust stay so nice and crunchy. The amount of yeast provided was good too and once the bread had cooled down it was easy to cut and not too floppy.
I think this would also be a good mix for a raisin bread :)

A little fruity!

We've been meaning to try raisin bread for a while, this was the week!

As per usual, we decided to stick to the basics for our first trial and not get too fancy. So we used the bread mix from our first attempt which made an average white loaf.

Our additions to the bread mix were: 1T margarine, 1t mixed spice, 1 pinch of salt and 1cup of sultanas.

We used the Basic raisin setting on the bread maker. This means we could put the raisins in the little tray at the top so that they would be added at exactly the right moment.

We have the delay timer perfected now and we woke up to the most amazing smell this morning.  

And here is the result!

The bread mix worked better this time (no large bubble at the top) but we still think there is a bit too much yeast, it makes a very light loaf which is not exactly right for fruit toast.

But, it was very very tasty. I think next time I would add a little more spice and a few more raisins. I would also love to try it with dates (but Tom might not be so happy about that). There are a few recipes which use eggs and milk but we weren't able to use the overnight timer for them, so we'll try that next time.

Back to the Ancients with Dudda

Some say an ancient meaning for Dudda is "round". Today, Dudda just tastes good and is yet another step forward in our basic research about the art of bread making.
He is made from the same Ancient Grain mix as the mysterious bread "B" but this time we used the "Whole wheat Rapid", large setting, which reduced the time to eat from 6 hours to 3 hours (the initial wait time is down to 25 minutes - we're still unsure what that is for).
The crust turned out noticeably less crunchy and the top is a bit brighter but still baked through all the way. All in all a good, quick alternative.

Next time we're going to experiment with adding extra ingredients!

Claudia the German

It's the weekend again, and what's a good breakfast without a freshly baked bread? Today we're feasting on another one of Laucke's mixes, the German Grain.
It's another first for us so we followed the rules. 460ml of water, one bag of flour mix and 1.5 teaspoons of yeast. We were baking over night again, so we chose the French setting which takes 6 hours to run. This time we got the timer settings right and woke up to the smell of yeast/bread - nice :) And here she is still warm:

Turned out a bit darker than the picture on the back of the box and we were expecting it to come out larger. But the density is good and it tastes very nice. Another successful bake!

The adventure continues, into Ancient territory!

Pretty soon after finishing up our first loaf we decided to give it another try. This time we used a bread mix from the brand lighthouse called Ancient grains, sounds promising!

The instructions on this pack were a little more complicated (although that isn't saying much). It took us a little while to decide whether our loaf should be made on the medium or the large setting, because the amounts of flour used (500g for the mix) are in between the 420g (M) and 520g (L).

The instructions on the box said to use the French setting, so for this first trial we stuck to the rules. In the end the French setting doesn't let you choose the size or the crust setting so we needn't have worried.
This setting has a "wait" period of almost two hours where the bread mix, yeast and water all just sit in the mixer. It can't be for yeast activation because they tell you not to let the water touch the yeast, so I'm really not sure why this step is necessary, it certainly makes for a longer wait (we decided to make this one during the day so we could take it out as soon as it finished).

As Tom mentioned, last time we didn't set the time properly, and woke up to cool bread and no fresh bread smell! This time how ever, we got to sit around for an hour in a house that smelt amazing but had to wait for it to finish baking and cool!

So, the final product.

The crust was beautifully crunchy and it came out of the pan really easily. We only managed to wait 5min for it to cool down before trying some, so it was deliciously warm and very tasty with butter and jam. 
I was not quite so blown away with eating it at room temperature the next day, it's a pretty heavy bread, but still very good overall.

I'm tempted to try a Banana bread later in the week (even though it's not really a bread and would probably be just as easy to make in the oven).

The adventure begins

We all have to start somewhere, so this is me just having bought the Panasonic SD-2501 automatic bread maker.

Don't I look excited? :)

Well prepared as we are (mostly Lizzy), we already had a bread mix at home waiting to be baked. Let's start easy, we thought, with the Laucke crusty white bread mix, 500g.
Since this was our very first (control) bake, we made sure to follow the instructions by the letter. Yeast down the bottom, bread mix on top and then 350ml of unfiltered, chlorinated, Aussie tap water (nom!).
We put the bread maker on "medium size" and "medium crust" and fired up program 1: basic.
Timer on 5 hours so we could wake up to the smell of freshly baked bread.

And here she is, our first bread. Following the old tradition (thanks Gerald), I named her Amelie

She turned out a little bit uneven with rather large air bubbles in the top and a bit too dense down the bottom - room for improvement.

We also found out that she's been sitting in the bread maker for several hours before we took her out due to some misunderstanding in the manual about how the timer setting works; apparently, it's not the delay start time but the finish time...