Tim’s Internet Web Log

As I’ve not been earning any bread recently I’ve had lots of time at hand and so I’ve been learning to bake bread.

Pretty decent whole-meal wheat loaf, painfully simple:

• 450g strong wholemeal flour[1]
• 1tsp quick yeast
• 1 + 1/4 tsp salt
• 365g warm water[2]

Mix everything well

Put the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl and mix together then add water and mix together with a wooden spoon. Make sure all the flour comes off the sides and bottom of the bowl, add a bit of water if necessary to “clean” the bowl and get all the flour into a dough. A bit of extra water wont hurt and if your dough does get sloppy just add a little more flour as you’re kneading.

Knead it for a while

Knead the dough for 10 minutes with a mixer/dough hook or a while longer if kneading by hand. It will all be kinda wet but that’s okay because your bread will be nice and moist. I use a hand mixer with dough hook attachments that cost about £15 so you don’t need fancy equipment for this.

Leave well alone for 2 hours

Leave your dough in the bowl for a couple of hours with a plastic bag over it to keep in the moisture, it will rise lots. This step is called fermenting the dough. I put the bowl in the hot water cupboard where it is warm but that just speeds up the process it doesn’t change the result, you can even ferment a loaf overnight in the fridge.

Knock it flat and roll it up

Scoop the dough out of the bowl onto a clean, dry work surface. Scattering some flour on the surface first will make life easier. Stretch out the dough into a rough rectangle about the width of your bread tin and roll up the dough lengthwise, tighter the better, into a loaf. This rolling will give it some form when it bakes, it is a neat trick that I only learned a couple of weeks ago.

Put it in the tin and leave it alone for an hour

Put the loaf in your greased (butter or oil, whatever) tin with the seam down and let it rise in the tin for about an hour. This rise is called the proof and it is the final rise before baking.

Bake it for 35 minutes at 180C

Bake your loaf in an oven preheated to 180C for about 35 minutes. I always put a jug of boiling water in the oven just as I put the loaf in, this creates a humid atmosphere in the oven which improves the quality of the crust, not sure why.

Stick it on a rack and let it cool

Take the loaf out of the tin when it comes out of the oven and cool the loaf on a rack so it doesn’t get a soggy bottom.

Eat it

With lots of butter, while it is still warm.

[1] strong just means that it is high in protein and it will say “strong” somewhere on the packaging for the flour in the shop

[2] just mix boiling water from the kettle with tap water

Slightly concerning that I’m getting my tech news from the Beeb but they have an article on the future of Firefox that discusses some of the advances in running online applications offline. While I think that this might be useful to an extent I’ve for the most part started treating lack of Internet connectivity more or less as a rare outage than a common occurrence and I think that it will become less common, as a result offline working will become far less important. Link

Just fired up Mars Edit for the first time in ages. Mars Edit is my favourite blog editing tool for the Mac. Yay. More posts soon. Ooh, Mars Edit was sold to a new developer so hopefully there will be a lot of new features on the way. Also my old NetNewsWire license still works so I’m happy about that.

Yesterday M and I cycled to Cambridge. We left Stoke Newington early and headed east towards the Lea River. Headed north about 30 km up the Lea to Ware and then hit the old Cambridge Road for 60 km into town.

Didn’t spend a whole lot of time in Cambridge but did enjoy a celebratory beer in the sun beside the Cam when we got there.

Monica has a better write up on her blog. Link.

After an abject failure to get smarterfitter.com off the ground this is now turning into a personal blog at http://gatezero.org/~tim where any/all  of my writing/web publishing will be posted.