A Beautiful Loaf of Bread

As I’ve been working on the chapter on bread in my planned forthcoming cookbook (when it will come forth is very much an open question), I got inspired to make a bread-machine loaf, something I don’t usually do. My breadmaking usually falls into much more controllable territory–rolls, pizza dough, breadsticks, and overnight bread baked as a round. I don’t have to worry about whether or not rolls are going to cave in, as they are baked outside of the machine. I can eyeball how far they’ve risen and adjust accordingly. But a big loaf is inherently much more unstable, and you can’t tweak the machine’s cycle after it has started. Here it is, though. I was reminded of a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, in which the orphan Rose is raised by her Uncle Alec. She takes housekeeping lessons from one of her aunts as a part of her education, and here’s how her baking lessons come out:

It was some time before the perfect loaf appeared, for bread-making is an art not easily learned, and Aunt Plenty was very thorough in her teaching; so Rose studied yeast first, and through various stages of cake and biscuit came at last to the crowning glory of the “handsome, wholesome loaf.” It appeared at tea-time, on a silver salver, proudly borne in by Phebe, who could not refrain from whispering, with a beaming face, as she set it down before Dr. Alec,—

“Ain’t it just lovely, sir?”

“It is a regularly splendid loaf! Did my girl make it all herself?” he asked, surveying the shapely, sweet-smelling object, with real interest and pleasure.

“Every particle herself, and never asked a bit of help or advice from any one,” answered Aunt Plenty, folding her hands with an air of unmitigated satisfaction, for her pupil certainly did her great credit.

“I’ve had so many failures and troubles that I really thought I never should be able to do it alone. Dolly let one splendid batch burn up because I forgot it. She was there and smelt it, but never did a thing, for she said, when I undertook to bake bread I must give my whole mind to it. Wasn’t it hard? She might have called me at least,” said Rose, recollecting, with a sigh, the anguish of that moment.

You may notice, by the way, that Rose seems to be using yeast for cakes and biscuits instead of baking powder. The book was copyrighted in 1874, well after baking powder had been invented but well before it had been standardized (which didn’t really happen definitively until the 1930’s). So Rose isn’t just measuring out that two teaspoons of leavener and then popping the cake into the oven; she’s having to let the cake rise with yeast. And of course she isn’t using a mixer, or even granulated sugar. I’ve read a description of the cake-making process in the 1800’s which included hand grating enough sugar for the recipe from a hardened sugar-cane syrup cone and picking raisins off the grape stems where they had been dried. If Rose had to whip eggs for her cake, she did it by hand. And when she got to the bread, she did her kneading by hand. It’s a wonder that everyone didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome back then!

Anyway, for us modern wimps, here’s the very basic recipe I used for my own “handsome, wholesome loaf,” from the Bread Beckers Recipe Collection paperback spiral-bound recipe book by Sue Becker that came with my grain mill back in 2009. (But the same info is on their website, thus the link.) I like the recipes on the whole but have to point out that her advice about what sweeteners to use is pretty laughable. (Sugar is sugar. Period. She wants you to use honey–“our only, truly natural sweetener”–or something called “Sucanat”–which is, to quote her again, made from “the juice of the sugar cane.” Isn’t that . . . sugar? Yes, it is. As is honey, which does indeed have some vitamins and minerals but only in trace amounts. You’ll note that I do use honey in the following recipe, but I use it for its taste, not for any so-called health benefits. Molasses, another sweetener she recommends, is a by-product of sugar processing. Blackstrap molasses is the sludge left over after the third extraction of sugar crystals, and I guess it does have some iron in it–although I’m sure I read somewhere that its iron isn’t usable by the body–but it tastes so awful that no one would use it as a sweetener in something you made the effort to bake. Indeed, health-food sites advise you to take it like medicine. The Becker book overstates the iron content in BS molasses [pun very much intended] by a multiple of almost six and the calcium by about three. Okay, end of rant.)

You’ll notice, by the way, in the picture of the loaf above, that the top is a little pale and there’s a slight mushrooming effect. These flaws are due to the fact that the recipe calls for an optional egg but doesn’t have you decrease the water if you do add it. I should, of course, have done this anyway. So there was a little too much dough for the size of the bread machine pan, since I had to add a significant amount of additional flour–probably close to 3/4 cup–to get the dough to the proper consistency. I’ve made the appropriate comments in the recipe below. Please note, by the way, that for now I’m not trying to do a definitive bread recipe that will work with all machines. I have a Zojirushi bread machine that makes the larger loaf you see in the picture. (Sue Becker gives settings you can use for that machine.)  If you have a machine that makes smaller loaves I’d advise cutting the recipe below in half.