Bread baking

My grandma used to bake really good bread. Whenever we visited, we'd have thick slices of homemade toast and jam for breakfast. It was heaven. But for some reason Grandma quit baking bread. I don't know why. Probably because she was tired of baking loaves upon loaves of bread only to have us descend like locusts and clear out every last crumb. Now she buys bagged bread like the rest of us. Toast and jam at Grandma's just isn't the same anymore.

I asked her a couple of years ago if she would give me her recipe. "Oh, honey," she chuckled. "It's just a plain old white bread recipe." I didn't push the issue, even though I didn't know any plain old white bread recipes, and subsequent comparisons of recipes found online and in my few meager cookbooks turned up more variances than common points. I've tried a few bread recipes over the past couple of years, but none of them come anywhere close to Grandma's.

Today I remembered that before he died my grandpa compiled small binders of family recipes for everybody. Maybe Grandma's bread recipe is in there! I hoped. Navigating the recipes didn't turn up Grandma's recipe, but I did discover my great-grandma's bread recipe. My great-grandma died when I was eight years old, but I still remember (and she's still hailed for) her really great dinner rolls. So I decided it would be worth a shot to bake a batch of her bread.



I got out the Kitchen-Aid mixer and all the ingredients. I began following the recipe, but started suspecting something was off when it called for six cups of water. SIX. CUPS. I became more worried as the bowl filled with each cup I added. Why didn't it occur to me that Great-Grandma's bread recipe would yield more than a loaf or two since she, like my grandma, probably baked bread rather than buy it from the store. My optimism that all the dough would fit in the bowl slowly dwindled as I began adding cup after cup of flour, turning the concoction from soup into glue before it was finally too much to be contained. With a heavy heart I resigned myself to the idea that I would have to knead by hand instead of letting the dough hook do all the work. I sprinkled flower on the counter and poured the massive dough baby on top. I added more flour, kneaded, flour, kneaded, and so on, until almost the entire new bag of flour was gone and the dough seemed to be the right consistency.

I then set it aside to let it rise. After about an hour, I punched it down and kneaded some more. I knew all that dough wasn't going to fit in my two bread pans, so I devised a clever plan for the extra three loaves I got out of the recipe; two would go on a cookie sheet and one would go in the funky-sized pan. I let them rise for half an hour then baked them for about forty minutes. They looked freaking delish and smelled even better!

I patiently let them cool for a while, then, when I couldn't stand it anymore, cut off a thick slice.

It was bland. Not enough salt, too much sugar. I suspected as much when I was making it. I guess Great-Grandma spent so much time perfecting her rolls her bread recipe suffered.





But I'll find a way to gag it down.