Reddit mentions of The Bread Bible

Thanks for all the comments! This is basically a beer bread with thyme (so, yes, it is thymey-wimey).

I just made up the recipe on the spot, but here's a rough simulacrum of what I did:

• 3 cups white flour
  
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
  
• 1/2 cup spent barley (from homebrewing)
  
• 2 12 oz beers (amber ales)
  
• 1 T cider vinegar
  
• ~1-2 T milk
  
• ~1-2 T dried thyme
  
• 1.5 tsp dry active yeast
  
• 1-2 tsp salt
  
  Toss everything in a bowl and knead it all together (make sure to add the salt after the yeast has already been mixed in). You may need to add more water or flour to get the right consistency - you don't want the dough too wet, but you don't want it to be too firm either or it will be difficult to shape. Toss it in an oiled bowl, put oiled plastic wrap over it, and let it rise for about an hour.
  
  After it has risen, take ~1/4-1/3 of the dough and separate it into about 8 chunks for the tentacles. Shape the rest of the dough into an oval, and begin adding the tentacles, working from the bottom to the middle of the oval/face. If you have trouble getting the tentacles to stick, you can moisten the ends with water before sticking them on. Slash the dough to define the sides of the head and forehead creases, and add eyes of some kind (I used two cloves of garlic). Let this rest for 15-30 mins. Finally, put it into a 450 F oven for 10 mins, then turn down the heat to 350 and cook for another hour or so, until the bread reaches ~200 F on the inside (I used a meat thermometer to check). When you go to bake it, you can also toss a handful of ice cubes into the bottom of the oven to add moisture and help give it a crispier crust.
  
  
  If you're interested in learning more about making bread from scratch, I'd highly recommend checking out the Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. It's a little pricey, but it includes tons of great recipes, and (more importantly) explains how and why bread making works, and what does what. It's helped me get comfortable enough that I can now throw bread recipes together and actually have them turn out well!
  
  Hope this helps!

I learned using The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I found it useful in several ways. It has a great section on what materials and tools you'll need and will use, what the quality of your ingredients will need to be in order for the end product to be a certain way and so forth. Also, each recipe has great instructions, and a bit of the history of the recipe. Overall, a great book for the beginning Artisan Bread Baker.

I've also heard that Rose Beranbaum's The Bread Bible is a great resource, but haven't had time to look into it myself.

Recipe used was Rose Levy Beranbaum's 'butter dipped dinner rolls' (From this book: http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941)

Here is an online source for the recipe, not sure if it has been changed at all, as I'm at work and can't comparel with my copy: http://www.starchefs.com/chefs/RBeranbaum/html/butter_dipped_r_beranbaum.shtml


And this is how to shape them: http://www.finecooking.com/item/35591/how-to-shape-knotted-dinner-rolls

Edit: recipe is the same, but here are some photos of the ingredient lists as they're also listed in grams for better measuring accuracy: http://imgur.com/a/LV9XP

Recipe here. I hate having my computer/books out while i'm baking (flour gets everywhere), so I write my recipes on a chalkboard in my kitchen.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

edit: Recipe is courtesy of The Bread Bible

edit 2: Thanks to /u/breadbandito for the temperature/slashing tips!

Even better, learn to make it yourself without a bread machine. It takes more time, but you'll never want to use a bread machine again.

I can highly recommend the recipes in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941

If you want the simplest no-knead approach as a foundation for variations, I'd recommend Jim Lahey's My Bread. He's less up-tight about details than Ken Forkish, but the bread is just as great, and there is a lot more variety (e.g. carrot bread, olive bread, cheese bread, coconut-chocolate bread). But it's not a comprehensive recipe book.

If you want a more traditional book of recipes, I'd say check out Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice or Beranbaum's Bread Bible.

I run our parish's annual yard sale. The things I can guarantee will be there every year are bread machines and exercise machines (we no longer accept piano's because disposing of those after the sale is too expensive). Obviously there must be people who use them, because they are still being made, but if your wife has a stand mixer, I suspect your gift would be ay my next yard sale. If you want to honor her for baking bread, perhaps The Bread Bible would be a better choice.

The Bread Bible

No real need to buy a book unless you want to this http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393057941/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1420742471&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40&dpPl=1&dpID=51IPIUozm7L&ref=plSrch is a great one.

I would check out www.thefreshloaf.com it's probably my favorite bread site around. A lot of the recipes deal with ratios and weights. That can be a bit confusing, but a quick google search for conversion to volumetric measurements will square you away. If you're serious about finding good recipes this site has them. Don't get scared away by the funky measurements and ratios!

I also love this type of bread. It's a bit tricky because there's a lot of extra chemicals in there that make your yeast so funny things. Probably the most important thing to do is to soak any of the seeds you're using, make sure your yeast is thoroughly proofed and read to ferment, and of course proper fermentation of the dough. In my experiences all but soaking takes some trial and error. The fermentation process has a lot to do (for us home baker types) with texture, touch, and what the dough looks like.

Good luck!

Ok I'm going to start with yeast which from here seems to be the culprit.
First off types of yeast:
Fresh
Also called called cake yeast this is non dried non grain yeast, I've never seen it in stores and only seen it in a few recipes. Most of the time the only people who use this are professional bakeries. Pretty much only here for posterity's sake. If you find a recipe generally you can substitute one of the two bellow adjusting your liquids as needed.
Active Dry
This is pretty standard stuff it has been dried and has fairly large grains. It is best stored in the refrigerator or freezer to keep it fresh, remember yeast is a living organism. Must be proofed before using (more on this later).
Instant
Also available in stores the grains are much smaller than active dry and do not need to be proofed. The smaller grains and possibly the way it is produced mean that it has a greater effect than active dry yeast. You can substitute one for the other. To use instant in the place of active dry reduce the amount by 25% so 1 teaspoon of active dry becomes 3/4 teaspoon instant. You can work the other way too just be sure to use 25% more of active dry when replacing instant.


Now lets look at the physiology of yeast and see what makes it tick. Yeast is a living organism we carefully add it to recipe allow it to grow and multiply to give us the effects we desire. Then we kill it. Cheerful thought.
So first we allow the yeast to grow. Yeast needs a few things to prosper: food, warmth, and a suitable environment. Yeast like everything else needs food to survive, we use sugars and the flour itself. Yeast uses any sugar (honey, cane sugar, malt) you add to a recipe to grow and in return it creates carbon dioxide, the air bubbles in bread which makes dough rise and makes the difference between cooked flour and bread. Yeast also breaks down some of the proteins in flour and converts them to simple sugars. Secondly yeast needs warmth to grow if you keep it in the fridge or freezer you slow the growth and you can prolong the life of the yeast. On the flip side when you want to encourage growth you need to make sure that there is enough heat to be active. So when you want your dough to rise leave it somewhere warm but not hot. Most places recommend something around 70 to 80 degrees if you can manage it. A laundry room is a good option. Just make sure it does not exceed 120 degrees because that is about when yeast will start to die.
This leads us to the second half, killing yeast. Killing yeast can be pretty easy and I suspect it happened inadvertently in a few of your loaves. First as mentioned above if it is too hot your yeast will die, this includes any water you add as a good rule of thumb your body temperature is ~96 degrees so if water feels neutral to you that's about how hot it is. Try to get a digital instant read thermometer. They are pretty cheap and very handy, you can also use it to check the internal temperature of bread to see if it is done. Secondly is the environment, direct contact with salt kills yeast. Most recipes will tell you to add the salt and yeast separately allowing each to mix into the flour so direct contact is not made.


Now to sum this all up into one topic technique, proofing. Proofing is what you do when you take the yeast (generally active dry) and add it yo the water you are going to be using in the recipe and allow it to sit for 10 minutes or so The water allows the yeast to wake up and start being active, you will see bubbles form on the surface, thus prooving that your yeast is alive. Some recipes tell you to add a pinch of sugar to the water, this gives they yeast something to process. Just make sure you don't add all the sugar the recipe calls for. This can cause a period of high activity and then a sudden crash when the yeast over exerts itself. The end result is a longer rise time. Instant yeast doesn't need to be proofed since the smaller grains dissolve instantly on contact with the dough but I do it anyway sometimes just to help get things started.


This is about all I have for yeast, a few other points I have. Salt is very important, it greatly affects the taste of the loaf and helps control the growth of the yeast. Check to see if your recipe was calling for kosher salt or table salt. Table salts grains are much finer and result in a much more concentrated amount per spoonful than kosher. Salt also has the annoying habit of attracting water molecules from the air causing it to swell, this changes the actual amount of salt you get in a spoonful. Try and go by weight if you can. A scale is an enormously useful tool for baking. Flour has a tendency to get packed down when scooped certain ways affecting the total amount you are actually adding to the recipe. Scoop and sweep is a good middle of the road approach that a lot of people use. My last point is that of freshness, see how old your yeast is you may need some new stuff, how long it lasts has a lot to do with how often it gets warm and where its kept. Yeast can last around a year in a freezer.


Finally for an excellent intro to baking try The Bread Bible you have to have a certain amount of conviction to name a book the anything bible but Rose Levy Beranbaum leaves no doubt that her book deserves the title. She carefully explains what you are doing and why in extremely detailed and percise instructions leaving little room for error.

Well that was quite the wall of text :p don't give up on baking yet. Send me a PM if you have any more questions or just want to chat. Good luck!

I love that book. Also I have The Bread Bible

Though it is out on loan, now, to someone I will likely never see again. Argh.

Just want to be sure: You are talking about this book? Right?

I have made bagels of all sorts and I can tell you that the absolute best I've ever made are found in Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Bread Bible. This of course assumes that you like chewy bagels and not the fluffy things that get sold in stores. I hope you have a good mixer, because the dough is hardcore!

P.S. The recipe calls for some ground black pepper. I know you are going to look at that and think "WTF? I'll just skip that". Don't. It is not for a super powerful taste of pepper but gives an interesting flavor.

I'm a fan of The Bread Bible

The Bread Bible will tell you EVERYTHING there is to know about the art of making bread.

> Okay, I think our disagreement, such as it is, is mainly semantic. My point is that talking about morality in terms other than human welfare doesn't make any sense, and that thus the only sensible way I can see to have a discussion about what people 'should' do is to discuss the effects of actions on human welfare.

Indeed, but I think you're making an unnecessary error that will bite you in the ass, when you subsequently use the language of morality. It's something I see all the time. Ok, fine, we've done away with god, but what if god is the universe? Or energy? That sort of thing.

It's really questionable and seems to serve only rhetorical purposes - Christians accuse atheists of having either no morality or of having one they refuse to acknowledge, and people scamper off to their corners to think about how we can refute that. Or my favorite, "god" now means the thing you value most, so your god is human welfare.

Admit it, you're not really an atheist.

If you mean this is a good way to live to ensure welfare, then you're talking about the same thing the city planner is talking about, not the priest. It unnecessarily lends credence to their entire enterprise when you adopt their vocabulary.

If human welfare is something you value and you think there's a way to live life so that you can contribute to it... what needs to be more complicated than that? Why dip your toe even once in a well full of ghosts? Because it too purports to give you rules for getting what you want out of life? So does this, but nobody would call that a moral code. It's just a way to get what you want.

(As an aside, I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it at least tries to tell you how to get laid. If not, substitute this, which tells you how to get good bread. Is there now a morality of bread-baking because using one yeast over another gives you that better thump you want?)

> What do you mean by "better off"? Can something that doesn't exist be better off or worse off than something that does exist? Is it some hedonic calculus that concludes that lives with a sufficiently bad suffering to pleasure ratio were not worth living?

Indeed. If a person reports to me that he'd have preferred not living, that's enough for me. I'm quite certain that if a person's fear of death were switched off and they were given some time in which to contemplate never having existed, most would prefer this.

If we struggle with the idea of comparisons with something that never existed, then let them be snuffed out in the wombs. Certainly a fetus/baby has a measurable welfare - I'm saying most would choose not to go beyond that stage if they weren't terrified into existence by their evolutionary heritage.

I'm not sure but I think you may have been attempting to make bread. If so, please buy this book and read it. It explains everything.

http://smile.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941

This book is amazing and great for beginners. I just started making breads recently and have come to swear by it.

I got the recipe out of The Bread Bible. I just bought it a week or two ago, its great.

You're likely not kneading enough; that's how my breads used to turn out. Like what Protheanunicorn said, if there's not enough gluten development, you'll just have a fine crumb rather than delicious chewiness. If you're serious about bread baking, invest in a stand mixer that comes with a dough hook, to ease the strain on your hands.

A reliable trick I learned from Alton Brown to figure out if the dough is kneaded enough is to pull off a small piece of dough, hold it with the middle pinched between your thumb and index knuckle, and stretch it; you should be able to stretch it to the point where you can see light through it but it doesn't break. It should stretch pretty thinly, too. Here's a helpful video (at 3:30ish). You could also watch the full episode at the link for a lot of tips of the basics of bread making.

Also, find reliable recipes; easy recipes on generic websites tend to yield loaves of lesser quality. I can think of The Bread Bible, Cook's Illustrated, and King Arthur Flour's recipes.

http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941 Page 46.

It's from this book but I add an extra egg: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393057941

It's one of those 'personal preference' issues, really.

I've read a lot of the books that others have mentioned, but I haven't bought my own copies, mostly because I'm satisfied with Rose Levy Beranbaum's books, and have stuck with those. She's a good teacher who seems to understand the specific challenges of baking at home with the ingredients I can find. (Lots of other cookbooks seem to be focused on professional type baking situations, and on artisanal baking. Not what I need or want to use.)

Her recipes have been consistently reliable, approachable and the end results have been very tasty.

Some projects are apparently more than I want to manage, so I haven't baked EVERYTHING in her books, but I do own them all, if that tells you anything.

I learned a lot from her Bread bible.
http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941

Her newest, The Baking Bible also looks great (just got it, haven't yet worked my way completely through it.

http://www.amazon.com/Baking-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/1118338618/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y

There are a lot of different approaches to this kind of project. Along the way in my experiments, I learned that I'm not really all that fascinated with rustic artisanal breads, and that most professional cookbooks just aren't what I'm looking for in the way of specific advice on projects I can manage at home. For one thing, living where I do, finding top quality flours is a problem (i.e., online only).

Editing to add: I think it's probably best to buy a cookbook produced in your own country, whatever that might be. For example, ingredients can be hard to source, and wording can be a confusing issue. (British cookbooks have given me a lot of great ideas, but living in the US, I find I need to double check my understanding of the instructions and the ingredients. Metric measurements are a godsend, though, they simplify a lot. Other measuring standards can be more confusing.)

So the bible is at best 2% commandment (assuming we're including Leviticus, which nobody follows anymore, but i digress). Let's use The Bread Bible for contrast, as I'm most familiar with that compared to any other "bible" instruction manual. The Bread Bible teaches you everything you need to know about baking bread, and is mostly instructional (read commandment).

Now what I'm assuming happened is that somewhere along the line, some book publisher/marketer thought it a good idea to call something "the ____ bible" because it sounded catchy to them, and they felt the bible was some sort of guide book to life. Having been surrounded by christians my whole life, I can say there are quite a few people who consider the real bible to be such a guide book, but the text was never intended to be read this way. Granted, someparts are guidebooks (e.g. the commandments, the beattidues, parables, etc), but the lion's share of the book isn't. It's a collection of letters, poems and stories.

/rant

Recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's book, "The Bread Bible".

Occasionally I'll make oatmeal bread (which is delicious and easy) from the More with Less cookbook, but I get most of my recipes from the bread bible. It has a lot of great recipes and general information on how to bake. You may be able to find it at your local library, and if it's not there then they should be able to get it from another library.

Add 1 Tbs vital wheat gluten per cup of flour, esp. if you are using whole wheat. Let the dough rise longer. Check your oven temperature with a thermometer. Bread needs high temperatures because it's primarily the steam which expands the dough, explaining why bread expands so rapidly in the oven but so slowly on the counter.

If you really want to learn bread, The Bread Bible is a great read.

http://www.amazon.com/Bread-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0393057941