Well, first of all, i have to admit that my written english is not the best.
i'm doing the best i can, but as not being native in the american language, its a pain from time to time and my writing may needs a big heart of forgivingness here and there.
I gew up in europe. mostly in germany, but i lived all over and spend a good lot of time of my young adult ages also in italy, spain and greece. i have lived on the ilands sardinia and tenerife at t he canarian islands.
one thing i allways have been cusious about where food and how yummy dishes are made.
i have to admit, that it may not be super easy living with me, becasue i NEED to find out how to make EVERYTHING myself at home.
from apple cake, over bread, to smoked bratwurst and wine. and i dont even drink wine at all.
but having the need to understand all this food processes, wine where one of this strange things i wanted to know about.
most of the time i hhave lived my life as a single mother and being poor.
at least the time when my sweet boy wad been very little. money wise it changed around the time when my son was about 8 years old.
understanding that pre-made food is pretty expensive, it gave me a whole lot of possibilities, to cook almost everything at home by myself.
i could mention that pre-made food is highly processed and full of bad stuff, but i guess we can skip that, becasue everybody anyway knows this already.
so, being poor, in my experiences, does not mean that people have to eat poor at all. you can be poor but you still can be able to eat well.
there may be an issue if you never learned to listen to your body and you dont know when your body got enought nutrition.
this blog may gets tricky if you need lots of food just for your enjoyment of eating. everything i have to tell and to write and to show is basically made for people with a normal eating habit.
eating is not just filling the body up with nutritions. since we are human beings and we do have kind of a strong opinion about what we like and what not, eating also is a cultural thing.
western people do eat certain things while we mainstreemly dont touch others.
so, having written that, it means, this blog is about for our culture "normal" food and cooking and eating.
i still live together with my son. he now is 20 years old. he is still growing and he can eat a lot. teenagers can be that way..lol
we do eat a lot of bread.
i have to say, that germany is THE country of bread.
how many different kinds of bread germany has is kind of difficult to say. some say 600, and others say 1500, it may just be something in between. fact is, bread, and special good bread is a delicious thing to eat.
traditional, germans eat breat in the morning and bread in the evening. in the morning with sweeter things on top often, like jelly, nutella, honey etc, and in the evening with salty things, like mortadella, pepperoni, cheese, scrumbled eggs or omelette etc.
modern people tend to eat a lot. at least, way more than we need. being a person who loves to snack here and there my self, i can not judge this much at all. but we may need to watch how and what we eat, to understand w here many of our problems may are coming from.
so, back to the bread.
we bake bread at home ourselfs. probably every other day is bread baking day.
you think its a lot of time to do?
yeah, in the beginning its work, but than it gets easy enought that you dont even gett that you are baking a bread, until you smell this heavenly bread smell all around you and your neighbors are knocking on your door with the platter in the hand ;-)
there are 2 different ways to make bread. with yeast or with sour dough.
both raise the dough and make it light and fluffy.
the german bread baking does not require sugar, unless we are baking a dessert or cake bread.
to bake a normal bread, all we need is
flour
yeast or sour dough
salt
luke warm water
you can go to a healthfood store and buy a super little "artisan" bread for 5 bucks something. many of those do not even taste bad. but boy, for this price i can make some huge breads and it can feed my family for a few days
since may people dont know how to make bread, lets show how a normal bread is made with using yeast.
you need about 2 pounds of flour, you mix the dry flour with 1 soup spoon of dry yeast and 1 tea spoon full of salt
after it is mixed well you add 1 pound of luke warm water.
the water part depends of what flour you are using. pure white one, than you may need a little bit less, mixed ones, you may end up with a little bit more.
the dough should at the end not stick to your hands, but it should not be desert dry either.
you should be able to form a ball without having scars or cellulite kind of surface ;-)
after the dough got knead well together, place it in a large bowl. glass, or metal, it does not matter, even if you want to use plastic, go ahead and use it. we dont have plastic dishes so i use my glass one.
sprinkle some flour over the dough and place it in the bowl, than cover with a light humid dish towel.
let reast for about 40 minutes on a warm but not hot place. not in direct sun, not right on a heater either.
if your baking oven has a light, than turn on that light and place the bowl inside the stove.
after that time, you have to knead the dough an other time. knead well for about 10 minutes, how longer it takes, how better the bread will raise and be.
kneading is a great thing if you are mad about something. boy, all the agressivity straight turns into something great. you can punch the dough and roll it and hit it and knead...yeah... good things comes out from being mad some times.
now, after this knead time, place the bread on the cookie sheet. its good to either flour the sheet or to have a piece of baking paper.
cover with the kitchen towel again, but have the towl dry this time. since it will touch the bread, if it would be wet, it will stick on the bread.
let the bread raise for 1 hour.after 20 minutes of raising time, you can light wet the top of the bread and take a super sharp knife and cut some patterns in the dough. stripes, grits, or v's are great. cover again and let raise the rest of the time untouched.
heat the oven on FULL power right before the bread is done with the raising time. it should be super hot when you put the bread inside the oven.
if you place a heat resistenze bowl with some cold water inderneath the cookie sheet, it would be prefect. the water during the baking time starts steaming and holds the bread nice moist during the baking. but you also can just brush some water on the bread right before you put it in the stove. its not as effective like the bowl of water, but it helps a little bit.
after 10 minutes baking to highest, turn down the oven temp to 325 fahrenheit for t he rest of the time.
afetr the baking is done, get the bread out of the oven and brush the top and sites with cold water. just a little bit, dont bath the bread.
let cool down and enjoy.
thats the craftsmanship part.
since we do live in modern times, you may want to go to your next thrift store and buy a bread baker.
i do work full time, basically double full time. up to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. i dont invest my time with the kneading part anymore.
i have to admit, that the after the last knead, i most of the time take the bread out of the bread baker and knead 3 minutes by hand, than i shape my bread either round or long oval and bake in the normal stove. the bread gets better that way. but nobody has to, thats just my own preference and i still like to get hands on a little bit. some times i'm in the middle of a job and i forgett, than the bread baker just makes the full baking job himself.
with the misurements, you may have to look up how much flour you can use for your bread baker. they are quiet different in how much they can handle.
for this kind of bread baking, dont follow the bread baking instruction coming with a bread baker. those bread most of t he time is a bad as store bought ones because it often requires sugar .
to bake a good bread, it needs time. if the raising is forced to be quicker, you get a super fluffy light big bread, but you may have to eat a half bread before you are done. german bread is different.
its denser and people can and have to use the teeth to chew it. since we are made to use our teeth, its not a bad thing to eat things where our teeth do the job they are made for.
that above is just a basic recipie. you can play with it. add 1/3 of rye flour.
or
add 1/2 cup of grains, or sunflower seeds, or walnuts or hazelnuts.
or add 1/3 rye, 1/3 mashed potato, and 1/3 white flour.
this makes a juicy great bread too.
you can decorate the bread also with poppy seeds. just kind of roll the bread after the second raise in seeds.
yummy is also to fry some bacon crunchy. cut it in little chuncks and add it with the last kneading cycle.
you can be as creative as you want.
chopped olives are super tastefull too. what ever you want, you can do.
we bake msot of the time a mixed flour bread. 1/3 ryean d 2/3 white flour and than we play with mixed grains.
baking bread is not very difficult. the first 2 or 3 may become stone hard or too dense and dry.
if that happen and you dont like to eat it, slice it up, let it dry and make bread crumbs out of it.
but you also can make a bread desert of it, or bread dumplings. both yummy and good
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