The covid – 19 pandemic and the lock down have made all of us take up activities we normally wouldn’t do. I always “knew” I could bake bread, but the pandemic has made a baker out of me!
There are so many bread recipes out there on the internet that one is spoilt for choice. I’ve done a lot of cooking in the past, mainly for my own consumption, during phases of my life when I’ve lived on my own. When I was young, I used to routinely help my mother bake cakes, my contribution mainly in kneading the cake mix and licking off the remains of the batter afterwards.
I should confess that I’ve never been one for using precise measurements when cooking, mainly because (i) it takes away the joy of cooking, (ii) I could afford to make mistakes since most of my cooking has been for myself and there wasn’t been anyone else around to complain and (iii) of plain laziness.
After surfing the net, my gut feel about baking bread was confirmed to be correct. All one had to do was to mix flour with water, with a bit of yeast or baking power thrown in, along with salt.
I always try to avoid all purpose flour (maida) to the extent possible. Though all the recipes that I read mentioned either maida or a mix of wheat flour and maida, I doggedly went ahead with just whole wheat flour. Yeast in warm water, with salt and a pinch of sugar. Once the yeast rose by all bubbly, I added it to the flour and started to mix it with water. Once the dough attained chapatti dough consistency, I kneaded it for a few minutes, patted it down to the shape of a flat bread, rubbed some oil all over (so that it wouldn’t stick to the foil) and put it in the oven. After 20 minutes I checked, it wasn’t done. Another twenty minutes, and it still wasn’t done. A third set of twenty minutes and I took it out, determined to eat the fruit of my toil. It tasted like a chapatti, a chapatti that’s two inches thick and semi-cooked inside. Actually, it tasted okay (and I did eat it in instalments), but no one would call it bread.
It was obvious that the flour hadn’t risen. Was there something wrong with the yeast? Had to be. I wasn’t sure how old it was and it wasn’t easy to get some fresh stock, what with a lock down on. And so, I tried again, this time, using baking powder and ended up with the same result.
I did some detailed googling and got to understand that if bread is being made entirely with whole wheat flour, it needs to ferment for much longer. One website mentioned thirty six hours! Also, the dough needs more water than required for dough made out of maida. However, if the yeast and baking powder I had was no good, there was no point in keeping the dough mix to ferment for longer. I looked for alternatives to yeast and baking powder and found that if yogurt or whey is mixed with baking soda, one gets the same effect as baking powder. I didn’t have any baking soda and so I decided to mix some yoghurt with my baking powder, in the hope that the baking powder, even if old and not so effective, would trigger the yoghurt to cause fermentation in the dough.
So, I tried again for the third time. I mixed the dough with just yoghurt (no water at all), after adding a couple of teaspoons of baking powder. I made sure the dough was soggier than earlier. I allowed the dough to ferment for over 24 hours. Boy, did the dough rise up! It almost doubled in size. I baked it for 60 minutes, in three sets of twenty minutes each. When I ate it, it tasted like nothing I had eaten before!
I slowly came to the conclusion that there was possibly nothing wrong with my yeast or baking powder. So, I tried once again, this time with yeast and did not add any yoghurt. I allowed the soggy dough to ferment for more than 24 hours and saw that it rose up well, just as in my previous attempt. I baked it and got bread!
I think I had added a tad more yeast than I should have and the bread suffered a little bit on that count. However, it was good, tasty, whole wheat bread, which was very different from the “brown bread” that comes from the bakery. I suspect the brown bread one buys from stores has a fair amount of maida and colouring.
Today morning I baked bread for the fifth time, this time using yoghurt once again, because I had liked the product of my third attempt so much. I used three full cups of whole wheat flour and this is the outcome. Whole Wheat Yoghurt Bread! It tasted yummy and I immediately gobbled up a fourth of it without any sides!
Posts
