Bread, Toast and the Meaning of Life

Fed up with the poor quality of bread available here I've experimented with recipes of late to make my own, resulting in one that's tasty, has yet to fail, and looks rather lovely. The one thing lacking is a crispy crust.

Bread-making is an area where bucket-cookery won't work, so I have a precise recipe:



1.25 cups water
2 tbsps olive oil or walnut oil
a beaten egg added to the water
1.25 tsp salt
2.25 tbsps sugar
2.25 tbsps milk powder
4 cups strong white flour
7g sachet of fast acting yeast

I use a bread-maker on its dough setting to mix and rise the bread, then knock it back and kneed it briefly. That quantity makes two good-sized loaves, the top slashed in three or four places with a thin-bladed knife to make a pretty surface and a different texture when the cuts expand.

The loaves on a flat griddle are left to rise in a warm cupboard for at least two hours, then put in a cold oven and the oven turned on to 200C. They're cooked in about 25 - 30 minutes, then left on a cooling rack (fresh out of the oven, smelling wonderful, it's a tempter, but until the crumb has formed they are not right).

As far as austerity is concerned it's not a bad deal either, our eggs free, or sort of, from our chickens, and if I use Sainsbury's white bread flour at £1 for 1.5kg I reckon I get six of those loaves from one bag. Add 14p for a yeast sachet and pennies for the rest and a life-enhancing and delicious loaf costs, even with the energy needed, less than 50p. As regards those energy costs, I'm careful to make the bread before or with something else, so they're not extravagant.

But it's really not the cost that is paramount, but having bread that looks good, smells good, tastes good. Bread is such a fundamental thing to so much good eating. Soup with nice bread becomes a meal, for example. And toast at breakfast should be a basic human right.

The egg in this recipe gives the crumb a faint yellow tinge that becomes more obvious when the bread is toasted (and it toasts superbly). On Sunday morning drinking good coffee, eating toast and jam after bacon and egg, all was right with the world. Ours anyway.