So….there was a plan for this month, but it got derailed by my partner in crime getting a new stove (yay!) but not the right connector thingies (boo!) so this crazy-ass plan that was supposed to happen today will have to wait until next month. I shall leave you on the edge of your seats.
Instead I decided to play with MY NEW TOY MY NEW KITCHEN AID MIXER THAT I OWN AND WILL NOT MOVE OUT WITHOUT ME. Because I own it. It’s mine.
I’ve mentioned how the Little House books were a cornerstone of my childhood, and there’s a lot of food talk in those books. A lot. And I am not the only person to have noticed this, because we have the Little House Cookbook, which was published in 1979! I didn’t know what a lot of these foods meant as a tiny BlondeHeadedGirl. (“Mom, I want to make pickled green tomatoes. What spices does Laura mean?” “I don’t….what?”) (The text just said spices, and neither of us knew about pickling spices at that time.)
Anyway, one of the recipes is Ma’s Light Bread, which involves a “bread sponge.” Now, I initially pictured that as some sort of….actual sponge… that somehow, you made… bread out of? Or used it, to like….do… something…? I’ll be honest. I had NO GOOD GODDAMN IDEA what a bread sponge was until I read the Little House Cookbook.
A bread sponge is the end result of proofing your yeast to see if it’s actually working before you put in ALL of the ingredients and then see that your dough didn’t rise and you say, “huh, my yeast is dead and I used up ten cups of flour FML.” You put your yeast in with warm water and a few cups of flour and let it sit over night. Ideally, you should put it in the refrigerator. Ma Ingalls would leave it out in her chilly kitchen. Also she didn’t have a refrigerator. It was 1880. Come on.
Anyway, the next morning, you can see if your yeast is working. Mine was! Yay!
Then you put in the rest of the ingredients- milk and fat and five million more cups of flour, and you eye the part of the recipe that says, “yeah, sure, you can have your mixer with a dough hook knead or whatever, but bread that kneaded by hand is MORALLY SUPERIOR” and you’re like “Nope, DOUGH HOOKS ARE MAGIC.”
Anyway, you knead it until it’s ready, which is something I’m still learning how to tell by feel. Then you let it rise until it’s doubled. I have found that talking to your yeast totally helps. “Okay, little yeasties! Be happy and grow! How are you doing? Look at you guys I’m so proud! Hi yeasties!” (maybe… uh… don’t do this when people are home?)
My boiler room used to be warm all the time and was the perfect proving (proofing? proving?) room, but we got a new hot water heater which is MUCH more efficient (yay!) and good for my gas bill (yay!) but doesn’t keep the room at a toasty 90 degrees (boo). However, I have found that if you heat your oven up to 175, then let it cool a bit, and put your dough in to rise there, it’s works pretty well.
Let the dough rise, punch it down, then it says to roll it into a rope, and cut off lengths to fit into your bread pans. (I need more bread pans.) Then you let it rise AGAIN, and then bake.
So unlike the “Artisan bread in five minutes a day” thing, this doesn’t save you any time. You still have two full rises and you have to knead the dough. The only advantage is that you know the yeasties are happy little yeasties doing their yeastie thing before you make the whole recipe.
It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s still at least a four hour process the day of baking. But now we all know what a bread sponge is. That’s the important thing, right?
I came across the term sponge reading Lucy Maud Montgomery. There was a bit where one of the characters had just gone to bed after setting her sponge. I recall being very puzzled.
My homemade bread recipe was my mother-in-law’s, which makes a very soft white loaf. Sometimes you just don’t want that healthy whole-grain stuff.
When I got my Kitchen Aid, I called it My Precious and stroked it every time I walked into the kitchen.
I make all of my own bread and have found that the timing has become instinctual (and if I’m not going to be home when a step needs to be done, the refrigerator is handy for slowing things down!). You’re going to have to count me on Team-Knead-By-Hand though, as that is my favourite part of the process! After reading your post, I think that I need to make some caraway-rye sandwich rolls this afternoon…
The professional proofer we used at the pizza joint also included a small pan of water at the bottom to make it nice and steamy. You could probably do the same in the oven.
Our Sicilian pizza dough would rise like a champ.
I always assumed it was a sourdough starter — who knew?
Given Ma’s personality as described in the book, I think it is entirely appropriate that her recipe gets all puritanical-judgey about kneading by hand. Honestly, if she were in your kitchen, she’d make you give your mixer to some obnoxious brat down the street who would leave it in a puddle. (;
I had no confusion about bread sponge when I was a kid, probably because my mum made her own pizza dough, so I may have been used to seeing yeast dough in various stages of growth. But I always got confused by the cake ingredients at the end of “The Long Winter” – until the internet, I had no idea what saleratus was (then why not just say baking soda, Ma, ffs?)
Dough hooks FTW, and congrats on your Kitchen Aid! Those things are amazing. I’ve bought the ice cream maker and pasta roller attachments, and currently have my eye on the slicer/shredder ones. Or a pasta extruder one. It’s an addictive toy.
I love love my Kitchen Aid. Mine isn’t nearly as fancy as yours (I just have the “Artisan” one) but OMFG IT IS THE BEST THING EVER. And the attachments. Sigh…
Also, I have two book-related cookbooks to recommend:
1. Lucy Maud Montgomery was an excellent cook. There’s a book “Aunt Maud’s Recipe Book” that collects a bunch of recipes from L.M.’s original hand-written cookbook and you can see images of the hand-written recipes! It’s amazing. It’s also interspersed with stories and photos from L.M.’s life. And the recipes have little origin stories too!
2. “The Book Lover’s Cookbook” has recipes that correspond to passages from famous books. They have an Irish Soda Bread recipe from Little House on the Prairie. 🙂
I had NO IDEA about the bread sponge but the rest of the post brought back lots of fond memories. My dad used to bake bread weekly and my brother and I would compete to be one who punched the dough down.
My dad started baking bread after we moved to SE Michigan in 1978 and none of the local bakeries met his standards (he’s a Chicagoan of Italian, Austrian and Croatian descent and he has VERY high standards when it came to baked goods). He brought all of his engineering skills and focus to bread baking. He stopped his weekly bread baking after he and my mom moved somewhere near a decent bakery but he still bakes and cooks like a mad scientist.
I was diagnosed with Celiac in 2001 and have been gluten free for 15 years. I’ve always said that if there’s a cure (or if I only have a day to live) the first thing I’d eat would be my dad’s nut strudel.
Thanks for reminding me, like I needed(HA!)another reminder, that I CAN’T FIND MY MF’G DOUGH HOOK!!! I put it somewhere “safe” after the kitchen flood. You know how that goes. On the other hand, the Occ therapist who works in my office says that kneading by hand would be good for what ails me. Unfortunately, I don’t think she meant my hands.
I debated long and hard before the big purchase. As I do. I’d always used an hand mixer. My whole life. What did I need with this big piece of machinery that I had no room to store? Of course, now I don’t know how I lived without the shiny red beast. And all the attachments. Ice cream freezer, how I love you….
Fortunately, my mother’s bread recipe is this awesome no-knead dough that turns out a dense loaf that is sooo good for pbj’s and grilled cheese. I took a picture of my first loaf that now hangs in the kitchen ’cause it was so pretty.
Bread in all it’s incarnations fascinates me. As well as proving (hah) your yeast works doing the over night sponge thing improves the final flavour of your bread, as do the two risings, not so important with wholemeal and granary breads, but it really does make a difference with white breads. And I have anecdotal evidence that the longer risings mean that some people who have bloating problems after eating industrially produced breads do not have bloating afer eating bread allowed to rise slowly; it obvioulsy wouldn’t make a difference to a celiac, but it may to people who describe themselves as gluten intolerant.
If you get into the habit of making bread you will find that you don’t notice the time it takes so much, dough is quite forgiving about being left longer than the instructions say – as long as you have a big enough bowl to contain the extra rising! “People dislike the idea of [making their own bread] because of the ‘time it takes’. The bread certainly wants time, I assure them, but not their time; it doesn’t ask to be watched, and can be trusted alone in the house; the actual labour in making a batch takes about six minutes from start to finish. But they shake their heads in a melancholy way as they ask for another slice” M. Vivian Hughes, ‘A London Home in the Nineties’ 1937. I think she underestimates the total time required, but the point is valid. The book, along with it’s predecessors and successors, is fascinating description of middle class life in London from the 1870s to the 19-somethings, well worth reading if you like historical memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ people.
DonnaMarie, good luck in your dough hook search.
I start with the dough hook, but I finish by hand because I have to FEEL how much flour is enough. Depending how well the dehumidifier is working on any given day, there can be a whole cup of variability there.
I’ve learned to ignore instructions on bread recipes that say throw everything in a bowl and then dump 130-degree water on it, which is way too hot for happy yeast. I heat my water to 110 F (no more! no less!), add a little bit of sugar, and stir in the yeast. In five minutes, it’s either hugely foamy or a dud. No waiting overnight!
The last time I ruined dough by following the yeast-murdering instructions, rather than throw everything in the trash, I softened another packet of yeast in a small amount of warm water with sugar, let it foam, mixed it into the “ruined” dough, and added enough extra flour to compensate for the extra moisture. It rose like the first mistake never happened and went on to fulfill its bread destiny. It might have had a slightly yeastier flavor (or I might have been paranoid because I knew I doubled down), but nobody else mentioned it and it was perfectly edible.
I want to tackle rye next, which I hear plays by its own rules.
Eli Brown’s Cinnamon and Gunpowder centres around a chef who gets shanghaied by a lady Pirate-Captain; he’s forced to make delicious food while she terrorises the high seas, or else. In desperate need of a good rise, the chef keeps bread sponge in a tin close to his heart.
Romance is on the backburner, but there’s an awful lot of food, competence porn and pineapple booze.
@Ez: that book sounded interesting, so I requested it from my library. Evidently, it was one of NPR’s best books of 2013.
I waited years and years and years for a Kitchenaid. Hand mixers for me or laborious hand mixing of bread. Why oh why did I wait so LONG!
(Yes, the sixties and seventies were full of homemade yogurt, homemade bread, homemade soups. That’s what we did those days. So one day my kid asks “can’t we just have Campbells? Sigh.)
Now I can whip up bread with my KA and its magic dough hook. My kids say it isn’t the holidays without my homemade-from-Julia-Child’s-recipe mushroom soup and fresh homemade bread. Funny what a decade of eating Campbells and bread from the grocery store makes them appreciate!
Yay for bread hooks! I love kneading by hand as well, but sometimes I need (ha!) to get something else done while the bread dough does its thing.
I think it’s time to make some of my rosemary bread. It gets baked in pie plates (2 loaves per recipe), and is amazing with soup. Perfect for our snowy weather this week!
I have been too scared to try bread (since a disastrous loaf and my friend’/ angry, angry parents in grade school), but I think I’ll,have to try again!
I love baking bread. When my fingers got stiff from too much calligraphy in college, my doctor told me to bake bread once a week, because the motion of kneading would keep my hands flexible and the yeast gives off an enzyme that is good for your joints. It’s a great way to stave off arthritis. I did that for years and amassed a lovely repertoire of recipes, until life got way too hectic. I did make my wheat germ herb bread for Thanksgiving; it’s the perfect Thanksgiving bread, all nutty and tangy. I make Greek New Years Bread every New Years Eve and try to make my grandmother’s bread recipe whenever I can, because it has the best flavor of any bread I’ve ever known. (It’s also the only bread I’ve ever seen that uses both yeast and baking soda.)
This does not mean I don’t envy your KA for many other uses. 🙂 Kitchen technology is the best technology.
My parents were both mad baking fiends–friends still mention the fresh-baked-bread smell of our house as being one of their favorite memories.
I always proof my yeast, but it only takes about five or ten minutes, not overnight. Measure the yeast into a container (I use a 2-cup Pyrex), add a little bit of warm water and a pinch of sugar. Cover if you want to. You know your yeast is alive if you get a foamy, bubbly liquid.
Also, when the bread is rising, I usually put the pans on tops of big bowls of water and I always cover them with kitchen towels.
Happy baking, everyone! It’s actually not all that much hands-on work and you’ll love the results.
Oh goodness, I’m confused. To me, sponge is a light kind of cake – you use it as a base for trifle, for example, but only when a bit stale and torn up.
I imagine that if you’re Ma, you flavour your bread with tears of despair because you’re married to a charming, feckless reprobate who thinks it’s a good idea to cross cracking ice in a covered wagon or settle his young family in Indian territory.
@Tam: If I remember correctly, the only sweetener Ma needed was to press her hand to the top of whatever she was baking. If I also remember correctly, that was some B.S. Pa told the children so it would seem they were disloyal to their mother if they complained about flavorless food.
I am overcome with the knead to make bread now. There is a cookbook available called Game of Scones, you may enjoy it.
Tam said:
I imagine that if you’re Ma, you flavour your bread with tears of despair because you’re married to a charming, feckless reprobate who thinks it’s a good idea to cross cracking ice in a covered wagon or settle his young family in Indian territory.
I love this site for so many reasons, and today’s is: I know I’m among my people when the word “feckless” shows up organically in the course of normal discussion about cooking – and that someone else thought Pa was the kind of unreliable, wandering musician-type dude we’d all dump on if we found him in our romances. Thank you, Bitchery <3
@Ez – we have a review for that book coming up soon from Carrie!
I was lucky enough to have a mom that baked so the sponge wasn’t at all confusing.
There was moment on the show where I learned about historical inaccuracy because Mary was identifying apples by smell that according to my dad didn’t exist yet. I remember being so disappointed they did do a better job checking these things.
I’m in the kneading by hand camp. Although tbh I mostly make the no-knead bread these days. But this post has really given me a craving to bake bread, in spite of the fact that I just got done cleaning up after the Thanksgiving cooking binge!
looks tasty!
I love my kitchenaid for yeast breads. and just about anything else.
When I got my shiny red kitchenaid last year, I told my bestie that it was akin to a balding, middle aged man with a paunch buying an obnoxious, gas guzzling, sports car. Except my new toy spread happiness in the form of cookies and cakes. And whipping cream. I’m still trying to get breads right. That mixer (they didn’t have the cranberry-hot pink color in the model I wanted) just looks happy every time I walk into the kitchen and makes me smile.
I make a sourdough sponge all the time for King Arthur Flour’s sourdough waffles, which are AMAZING. I need to find a go to bread recipe (that’s quicker than this one).
This reminds me, I have Pioneer Girl sitting in my to read shelf, and Little House in the Big Woods on my daughter’s.
I took a bread making class one afternoon taught by one of the artisan bakers in my town, and she gave us a great hint for how to tell when the dough has been kneaded enough. When you think you’re there (or hope you are), take a knife and cut off about section of dough about the size of a silver dollar. Flatten that section out, then hold it in the air, and slowly pull it in opposite directions (you’ll want to work it between your thumbs and fingers, so that your alternately pulling opposite corners). If you can pull the piece out until it’s so thin you can see through it, and it DOESN’T TEAR, then you’ve kneaded it enough.
The theory behind that is that kneading is creating gluten strands, and you want them to gain enough elasticity to rise.
Anyway… it seems to work.
I don’t have a fancy kitchen appliance, but I DO have a copy of the Little House Cookbook and it is awesome.
I used to bake all of our bread and my elderly KA is still chugging along after many years. For sure get the accessory kit which is probably why I’ve never felt the need for a food processor. What you do need is a knife sharpener and to develope the mother tiger guarding her cubs attitude toward your knives that seamstresses have tward their sewing sissors. You only need four knives: chef’s, paring, boning, and bread. Victorinox are relatively inexpensive and their off set bread knife is a marvel.
1. It’s definitely proofing–I learned that from Bake Off.
2. My fool-proof (fool-prove?) way to get your dough to rise: let your oven preheat to the “keep warm” setting while you knead, then turn the oven off completely and stick the dough in there to prove. Voila!
The first bread I ever made from scratch used the sponge method, so that’s been my standard. I don’t have a mixer, but I’ve found that kneading bread by hand is a wonderful way to vent frustrations and anger … and the dough doesn’t mind a bit. I use the ambient heat of my gas oven to let the bread rise – it’s usually enough unless the weather is cold and damp.
There is NOTHING like the smell of bread baking – just divine. And I treat myself by cutting off the heel of the fresh bread, slathering it with butter, and scarfing it down. My mother used to refer to this kind of thing as “cook’s privilege”.