Bread!

I made my first loaf of bread at altitude today! It came out positively divine, and I documented the entire process so I could share. I took a recipe from here and altered it, since I had hi-gluten bread flour but not just "gluten" like so many recipes called for. I also divided it in half since we're not actually huge bread-eaters in this here household, so it was a very experimental loaf. Usually when baking, I like to follow the recipe to a T at least the first time through and make my alterations from there, but maybe I'm getting more adventurous lately. Here's my recipe, with photos interspersed:



I call this my "Perfect Wheaty Bread" recipe. It's a simple yeast bread baked at altitude and it rises beautifully to provide a nice crust, and a soft, even texture inside.

YOU WILL NEED:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 packet active dry yeast
2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups hi-gluten bread flour
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons salt

Firstly, you want to make sure the yeast is active. To do this, combine the water, yeast, and sugar in a large bowl, and let it sit for about five minutes. Yeast doesn't like any kind of shock, including being cold. (I took the cold water first and put it in a big pyrex bowl, then microwaved that for about a minute or so before adding the yeast so that the yeast would stay warm and comfortable.) It will begin to eat the sugar once you add it and will bubble and mix with the water. If it doesn't bubble, start over with fresh ingredients. Cloudy beige water means yeast-fail (either it's dead, or the water was too cold or too hot). Mine looked like this:



Next, add the flours, oil, and salt all at once. I mixed it with my hand and didn't remember to take the picture until after I was thoroughly sticky. Fortunately, I have two hands:



Mix until everything is integrated, and dough forms a nice soft ball



Then turn the dough on to a clean countertop and knead for five minutes. In the house where I'm staying, there are chilly tile countertops so after cleaning them, I blasted the tiles with a hairdryer for a while. I don't honestly know if the chilly countertop would have been enough to shock the yeastie-beasties, but I prefer to work on a warm countertop anyway :P
If you're a real beginner and you don't know how to knead dough, it's super simple: just press the heels of your hands in to the dough and smush it forward, then grab the far end of it with your fingers and pull it toward you. Turn it about a quarter-turn and repeat it all. You want to fold a lot of air inside the dough so the bread will rise and get fluffy. I don't have any pictures of this part because I was busy kneading.
After five minutes, put the dough back in the bowl and let it rest for about ten minutes. It will get slightly larger:



Then knead it for another five. Return the dough to the mixing bowl and cover loosely with a dish towel. Put it in a warm place (I put it in the oven with the door closed; no heat, but on top of the fridge works too. If your house is toasty then it doesn't matter, but it's chilly here). Let the dough sit and rise for about an hour. it should be about doubled in size when the timer goes off.

I took the time while it was rising to prepare some trail mix to fold inside. A long time ago, some friends of mine were moving and they gave me a lot of food, including a bag of tasty trail mix. It had raisins in it, dried dates, sunflower seeds, pepitos, cashews and peanuts. I forgot about it and when I finally found it in the back of the pantry a few weeks ago, everything was dried enough to break your teeth, but was otherwise still good. I simmered it all in a pan for a while until the grapes were reconstituted, then let everything drain on a paper towel for a while. Before mixing it all in to the dough, I toasted everything on a skillet over low heat with a little wheat flour tossed on top to keep them from sticking to the pan.



When the hour is up, take the bread out and punch it down. If you're not adding anything to it, it's ready to go in the pan. This is when I added the trail mix; I just stretched the dough out like pizza dough, scattered the trail mix in it, and folded it all inside the bread. There might be better techniques for this, as it made air pockets in my final loaf. If you're not adding anything, don't worry about it; just punch it down, shape it in to a loaf, and set it in the pan.

This amount of dough makes one loaf. Lightly oil a loaf pan and sprinkle a little flour around the sides to keep it from sticking. Some people like to use cornmeal for this part, and some people don't bother using flour; it probably doesn't matter.



I also made a dent in the top of the bread, as I read somewhere that if you split it then there's more space for the bread to rise as much as possible. Cover the pan and put it back in the warm place to rise for another 30-45 minutes.



Preheat the oven to 425. (If the dough was rising in the oven, take it out before you begin preheating. This is duh, but just in case.) Once it's ready, bake the loaf for about a half hour. It will get nice and brown on top. Once it smells like really hot bread, it's probably ready to go. You can tell when it's done if you tap on the top and it sounds hollow.



Remove it from the pan immediately and place on a cooling rack for about ten minutes before you cut it.



We smeared it with a little butter and chowed down even though we'd both just had lunch. It was delicious!! I'm excited to toast it with butter, and maybe cinnamon sugar, and I'll definitely be making this exact recipe again.