Monday, January 23, 2012

A new experiment: Baking bread

Finally I bought a combination oven (microwave + convection + grill), a Samsung CE117AE-S model, to start my long awaited baking experiments.

The inauguration was done by our friends Aarthi, her mom-in-law and Prathiba with a yummy Chocolate cake over the last weekend.

Today was my first solo experiment, trying to bake bread. The recipe I used was from a personal finance blog :) Trent@TheSimpleDollar has this popular post Homemade Bread: Cheap, Delicious, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think. Followed the steps quite religiously and here is the outcome:



Looks good to me, and the house smells so delicious right now. I hope it tastes good too :-p

My take from this first time bread making:
  • The effort required is not huge at all. Totally I spent about half an hour in activating the yeast, preparing the dough, kneading it, punching it down, preparing the oven, etc.
  • But the process takes long time, about 3 hours, though your attention is required only for about half an hour.
  • Your kitchen work top can get messy, so some cleaning is necessary afterwards.
  • If you can buy yeast in bulk, and not the sachets which I bought (3 sachets for $3.5), it might be more economical to make bread at home regularly.
  • Just to get the aroma lingering around is worth making the bread!

2 comments:

Arun said...

Wish you good luck in ur experiments.. Especially since the prev one was a success, and i get to benefit from ur trials :-)

Aarthi@Paperandme said...

Divs Is Back with a BANG.. I have been pestering my hubby for an oven for quiet some time now.. i dont want a microwave and for me the range of electric ovens is not satisfying enough.. Will join ur baking adventure as soon as i get my oven..