hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1327.txt

Episode: 1327
Title: HPR1327: Frank Bell Bakes Bread
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1327/hpr1327.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:36:23

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Hello, this is Frank Bell and today I'm baking bread.
I've reached the point that I bake pretty much all my own bread, just occasionally we'll
get a loaf from the bakery at the local supermarket that has the best bakery.
I'm too busy or too fed up or too bored to bake bread, but I bake most of my own because
I like it and it's good bread and I know what's in it.
I've got all my ingredients out here, I'm going to start by proofing the yeast.
Proofing is a fancy word for making sure that the yeast is still good and all that's required
to proof the yeast, it to put some warm water in a saucepan, I'm using a nice big stainless
steel saucepan and let it sit there for a minute or two and make sure that it bubbles and
that it smells like yeast, which it does.
Today I'm going to make honey bread, honey whole wheat bread.
Anytime you make a whole grain bread like whole wheat or rye, it's a good idea to put
about half of the composition as being regular white flour.
I usually use unbleached white flour, I don't buy special bread flour or this flour or
that flour, just garden variety, unbleached white flour.
Because I, again, I know what I'm getting and you don't have to get the fancy stuff.
The key is in what you do with the ingredients after you mix them together.
I started off here with about two cups of warm water, I'm using the American measurements,
which are derived from the pre-metric British measurements, they are volume measurements,
volume measurements are not as precise as measuring by weight, a cup of rye flour is going
to weigh more than a cup of white flour.
I'll try to do some equivalence for the show notes because I know there are a number
of listeners in countries that are advanced enough to have accepted the metric system.
I've got the wheat in there and I'm looking for my wooden spoon, oh there's my wooden
spoon, I thought it had disappeared.
I'm going to add my honey so it gets nicely dissolved and distributive.
If I were just making regular white bread, there'd be no honey.
So I open up my little bottle of honey and pour it in and let's see here.
That looks good.
I think I put about a cup of honey in there and give it a little stir.
If I were just making regular bread, I might put a little bit of sugar in there but that
would be redundant after putting in almost a cup of honey.
Now I'm going to add, get started adding some white flour, I had some poured out there
it is and it's just a little bit to get started and give it a stir and we're also going
to add a little bit of salt, about half a teaspoon, I didn't measure it, I just poured
it out into my hand.
Stir this up a little and now I'm going to add some more white flour.
That was my flour container clanging against the measuring cup if it came through.
I put in a couple more cups here.
I don't want to add it all at once because it becomes almost impossible to get it to
blend smoothly if you do that.
So you add a little bit at a time.
Most recipes will tell you to add it a cup at a time that's really not necessary.
You can add two or three cups at the beginning and then add in greater detail.
I say two or three cups, I've got two cups of water here.
It's going to come out to about two loaves of bread.
I found that the determining thing on volume is how much water you start with and my
rule of thumb is one cup of water equals one standard sized loaf of bread.
That looks nice and blended.
Now I'm going to add some white whole wheat flour.
That's something that's only recently appeared on the grocery store shelves in my part
of the world.
I did a little research on it which meant 10 minutes on a search engine.
And it is the European variety of white, of whole wheat flour.
It's actually a different strain of wheat from what in the states we normally make our
whole wheat flour from our whole wheat flour tends to make a darker, a brown bread.
Now this is mixing up very nicely.
This is getting to be kind of the consistency of a thick mortar for those of you who've
ever built a brick wall.
That's kind of where we are now.
That's not enough flour yet, but we're getting there.
When you look at a bread recipe or a dough or batter recipe and a cookbook they'll say you
know use two cups of water and approximately seven cups of flour and the approximately
has to do with getting the flour to the appropriate consistency to need it.
And you can tell when that happens, let's see, I just, and I'll describe that when it
happens you can sense it and the appearance and the feel of the dough.
I need some more flour.
I used up all of my white whole wheat flour and I thought I had some regular American brown
whole wheat flour here in my pantry, there's rye flour, cornmeal, brown sugar.
It seems to have made a run for it, but it's not necessary.
I'll just put in a little more of this ungly flour here.
I think I'll just add half a cup this time and stir it up.
Now we're getting there.
You can tell when the bread or when the dough is ready for kneading, when it stops accepting
more flour.
That's why you add it towards the end a bit at a time because it'll come a point when
it will no longer absorb the flour you've added.
And I think we're at that point now.
Yes we are.
Let me walk over here, see if my camera is in reach, maybe take a picture of this.
There we go.
I think I can put a little more flour in there.
Just about a quarter of a cup this time and yes, that's looking good.
How does it feel?
It feels right.
And that's the other thing.
You can tell by the feel that you can touch the dough and it doesn't stick to you.
Then it's getting ready.
Now I'm going to pour it out on a floured board as the recipes say.
And that's simply, I've got a big chopping block here that's about 14 by 20 inches and
take a little flour and sprinkle over it.
And the reason for doing this is so it doesn't stick to the wood.
And then take my mixing bowl here and just dump the whole mixture out.
A little still stuck to the spoon.
So I scrape that off.
And now I'm going to put it in the sink and put a little detergent at it and fill it
up so it sucks so it'll be easier to clean when the time comes.
I don't want to touch the dough again while my hands are wet.
So I want to get them nice and dry and while I'm waiting for this dish to fill up because
I'll be using the same bowl for letting the bread rise.
Now I'm going to take some more flour, a little scoop of flour and sprinkle it on top
of the dough in case there are any sticky spots and then I'm going to knead it.
And that basically is pushing it together and then you push down on the middle with
your heels of your hands and then you pull it together again, push down on the middle
and you keep this up.
The old cookbooks would say need until it hurts for some recipes.
And that was not just flowery language.
If you do this for a long time, you're making a lot of bread, it could start to hurt.
Every once in a while I stop and I sprinkle a little more flour on the top.
If it starts to feel a little sticky, then you put a little flour on the top and you
work it in, it might accept a little more flour.
Now had I been making, had I been making rye bread instead of the whole wheat flour, of
course I would have used rye bread.
I probably would not have used honey, I would have put in a little bit of sugar and I would
have put in a couple of three tablespoons of caraway seeds.
Because the other member of this household really likes caraway seeds in her rye bread.
And I just sprinkled a little more flour on the top because it kneaded it.
The kneading kneaded it, kneading square.
Sometimes I make a darker whole wheat bread.
I'll use more whole wheat and less of the white flour.
One thing I didn't mention, I did use two packets of yeast, one per loaf.
I find that that gives me a better, faster and lighter rye to the bread.
Another thing that happens is if I were making say rye bread, the bread would, it's generally
denser, doesn't rise quite as high.
And of course you can see that in rye bread you get at the store too, they tend to be denser
than either the white, commercial white bread, whether it comes from a mass produced bakery
or whether it comes from the bakery right there inside the supermarket made by the, on
the spot.
And now this is getting to a very nice consistency.
And you can tell when it's ready.
After you bake your first loaf of bread, you will know it's ready because it just feels
ready.
It's nice and resilient, spongy, not sticky.
If you shape it into a shape it pretty much holds the shape.
And that's about ready there.
Let me wash off my hands here, I'm just going to lay it sit there for a minute or two while
I wash off my hands and wash out my saucepan here, okay that's done.
I edited out a lot of the washing signs, the clanging and so on, but the reason I washed
this is what I'm going to use to allow the bread to rise.
Now I've got my olive oil, I'm going to pour a little bit of olive oil in here and that's
to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan plus olive oil is a good thing.
And spray it around with a paper towel, set the paper towel over here on the side.
I want to put a little bit, need to make sure my hands are nice and dry before I pick
this up and I'll take another picture, okay and I just roll it up, it's nice and dry
and spongy to the touch, it's not sticky and drop it in the pan and I'll take this paper
towel and put dab it on the top with the olive oil and now I'm going to cover this with
a nice clean dish towel out of the drawer here and let it rise.
Normally on a summer day I would set it out on the deck where a temperature of 80 or 85
degrees in summer humidity is ideal rising conditions but today we have the humidity,
it's been raining all morning but we don't have the temperatures only about 72 degrees
outside.
In the olden days before I moved to this part of the world I had an old gas oven with
a pilot light, the pilot lights I know it pretty much disappeared, probably a good thing
in the long run for energy conservation but a gas oven with the pilot light inside
it was almost the ideal place to stick your dough to allow it to rise.
So I'll just sit here on the kitchen counter, I'm going to keep my flower board out, I'll
need it again so there's no reason to clean it yet and I'll be back with this when it's
time to punch down the dough.
Okay I'm back.
The dough has, as the cookbooks say, approximately doubled in the bulk and it's time to turn it
out onto the flower board which is fancy talk simply for turning the pan on its side and
letting the dough flow out.
And now that it's out, I'm going to go back to my flower jar and sprinkle some more
flower across the top because what is now the top was the bottom, it was in the cooking
oil, the olive oil and it's a little sticky.
And now I'm going to punch it down which simply means I start to knead it a couple of times
and a lot of the air that has grown up inside the loaf through the action of the yeast escapes
and it becomes firm and reduced in size.
I usually let my bread rise twice along rise and a short rise.
So now I've got this all punched down and just knead it a few times and maybe five or
ten times until you get a nice consistency.
And I'm going to take my bread knife here out of the knife rack and cut it in half.
I do this gently and it's all cut in half now and each one of the halves I'm going to
turn up on the cut end and place in the flower on the flower board to get a little coating
on the part that was exposed by the cutting.
And now I've got two loaves approximately the same size.
Now I'm going to do these in the loaf pans.
If I were doing a decorative loaf for a part of your something I might shape it into
a round loaf or a longer Italian style loaf and just plop it right on the baking sheet
or a cookie sheet for the next step but since this is just for utilitarian purposes
primarily for making toast in the morning I get nicer slices of toast when I cook it
in the loaf pans.
I've got two little aluminum loaf pans here and I'm putting a casserole pan filled with
water into the oven.
I'm going to turn on the oven and let it preheat to 400.
These will normally save for 25.
This particular oven seems to cook a little hot.
400 seems to be the right temperature.
Now what the water pan is going to do inside the oven is fill it with steam and when I
put the bread in that's going to help make the crust a little more on the harder side
and I like a crusty loaf of bread.
Now I've got my loaf pans here and I'll put a little olive oil in one of them and pour
it around.
I use olive oil whenever I can as opposed to regular just cooking oil or canola oil which
is actually rapeseed oil if you don't believe me.
Get up in your search engine.
I suspect that someone thought rapeseed was not a particularly marketable term and
you will find that from time to time in the marketing of foodstuffs where they'll
take fish and give it a different name.
I think tilapia used to be known by a different name that was nowhere nearly so romantic.
I might have been dolphin fish which you did you ever read Conteiki or seen the original
documentary of Conteiki.
The Conteiki crew lived a lot on dolphin fish which is a fish.
It's not another word for purpose or what we commonly refer to as dolphins.
It's a fishy fish like a shark or a tuna.
Very big too with a square head but they changed the name of it for marketing purposes
and I'm not taking this to the bank but I think they changed it to tilapia.
Now I put the loaves of bread into the loaf pans, covered them once again with the clean
towel and I'm going to allow them to rise until the oven is nice and preheated and then
I'll be back with you for the final steps.
And now it's time for the final step to cook the bread.
It's nicely risen up in the loaf pans.
I take the cloth on.
Before I put them in the oven I'm going to take my bread knife and slash diagonally
across the top of each loaf.
I don't know if that actually serves any purpose but I like to do it.
And then once it goes in after about ten minutes I'll open up the oven and take a brush
and brush water from the casserole pan in the bottom on the top.
I'll do that again ten minutes later.
Commonly these loaves take about 30 minutes to bake through.
Sometimes 35 you can tell by looking or there's the old baker's trick of putting a clean
knife into whatever you're baking and pulling it out and if it comes out clean whatever
you're cooking is done all the way through.
I will include some pictures of the various steps and link them up in the show notes.
And I will think about you all when I slice into this tonight and have nice freshly baked
homemade bread with my supper.
In case you're wondering why commercial bakeries and mass produced bread caught on, although
the total prep time has been about 25 minutes of actual work according to the timeline
on audacity.
The actual process of baking bread can take two and a half to three hours.
It's not something you can start in the morning, throw in a crock pot, go to work and come
back and pick up eight hours later.
It's a pretty sizable commitment of attention.
If you're working at home, it's easy to do, but if you have work in an office or some
other type of location away from home, you don't have the time to bake bread except possibly
on your days off.
I used to bake bread very early in the early 70s, someone gave us some sourdough starter.
And if you have heard of sourdough starter, but don't know what it is, it's basically
a living yeast culture.
And I used to spend the Saturdays baking bread, but when you have children coming along
and other commitments that pull on your time, the amount of time it takes to do this gets
sucked away from you and it's difficult to bake your own loads of bread on a regular
basis, though you can still do it for special occasions.
Before I got quite good at baking, what's called quick breads, like biscuits, pancakes,
waffles, and also anything with cornmeal, cornpone, cornbread, after all, I'm a southern
boy.
And I grew up on cornbread, it's especially good if you put a little can of jalapenos
into the batter.
But that is pretty much what I've learned about baking bread.
It's really very simple, much simpler than reading a recipe would lead you to believe.
And if you've never baked your own loads of bread, I urge you to give it a try.
It is one of the most satisfying items I've ever found to cook.
There's very few feelings in cookery akin to slicing the heel of a freshly baked loaf
of bread after it's cooled slightly, putting a little butter on it, and savoring your own
loaf of bread just out of the oven.
If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at PineViewFarm.net.
PineViewFarm is all one word, no spaces, no punctuation.
And my website is www.pineviewfarm.net.
Thank you very much.
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