Ahoy hoy, lads and lassies.

Today begins a new feature on mikeschramm.com! Basically, not only do I likes me a regular routine, but I’m running out of things to write about, and so I’m starting up a few regular features on the site. Of course, it is my site, so if they get boring, I’ll give them up and move on to something else. I can do whatever I want! You’re in my world now, grandma!

This one is called “I Require Sustenance,” and it will run every Wednesday. I’m very interested in cooking, but I’m not necessarily a great cook. What I’ll do is pick a recipe, and every Tuesday night I will try to make that recipe. Then, on Wednesday, I’ll share the recipe and the results (good or bad) with you. Kind of like a cooking show, only in text, and I may screw up. Actually, I’ll probably screw up quite a bit. I’ll definitely go through the whole recipe, though, so if you’d like to cook along with me, feel free, and if you want to, you could even send me a recipe or two for a future installment.

And we’ll begin with that commonest of recipes:

I took this recipe directly from Chicago blog Gaper’s Block’s excellent cooking series, “One Good Meal.” Brian Sobolak has been writing up a series of bread recipes, and he started with this one for regular white bread. As he says, I think everybody should eventually make homemade bread (sans bread machine or mix) at least once in their life. My Dad likes to tell the storyof a woman at work who bragged about her daughter’s cooking, until he found out that the daughter’s great achivement had been to make cookies from premade cookie dough. Sad, people. Get in that kitchen and bake something!

To start, we’ll need:

- 2 envelopes active dry yeast
- 2 cups warm water
- 1/4 cup honey
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 1 teaspoon melted butter
- 2 tablespoons salt
- 6 to 7 cups flour

He lists 2 envelopes dry yeast, which I thought was a lot, but I figure you can’t go wrong if you follow the recipe. The water has to be warm, so I tried putting two cups in a small bowl and then putting it in the microwave, but I spilled everywhere. I shrugged and put the water into a pot and went ahead and got it to just barely boiling on the stove.

I should say, also, that I have tried to make bread before. I made some beer bread earlier this year, and a month or so ago I made pizza crust using a bread recipe. Neither of those, however, ever actually rose, and while the beer bread may not have been supposed to, I think the pizza crust was. I chose to make bread today mostly because I’m not actually sure of my breadbaking abilities. But I am of the opinion that they’re leaning to the lower end of the scale.

Water heated (not boiling), I poured it into a nice mixing bowl I bought the other day. To that, I added the 1/4 cup honey, the butter and salt.

And then the yeast.

I think this is where I’ve had my bread problems. Beer bread didn’t use yeast, but the pizza crust did, and when I added it then, it just didn’t seem very alive. The way I understand it (obviously I haven’t attended Yeast University) is that there’s supposed to be little animals in there chewing on the sugar and salt and such, and churning out gasses and bready smells. But when I added the yeast, all I got was a muddy mix of water and butter. I did get a bit of smell, though, so I didn’t worry too much.

Let the yeast sit there for a few minutes. I took this time to put on some light music, namely the Polyphonic Spree’s album. This seems to me like bread making music. I would also have accepted Damien Rice, not because it’s good for bread, but because I got it the other day.

Now comes my favorite part. You put in about three cups of flour and start churning the thing up like it insulted your mother. The spoon I used this time was a little too small for me to get really comfortable, but I love how the dough kinds of eats up the flour as you put it in. With the spoon pulling in and out of the ever growing glob, it’s like an alien monster hungry for more! more! More!!

You can’t give this thing too much flour. Brad says add a tablespoon at a time, but I scooped it in there half a cup every 30 seconds. The stuff just sucks it up, and soon you go from a mushy mess to a round ball of dough. By the time it stops sticking to the spoon, the sides of the bowl, and anything else you’ve let it get it’s slimy hands on, you’re ready to get kneady.

I like the kneading, too, but a little less, if only because it’s much messier. I remember that my mother used to have a big board that she put her bread together on– she sprinkled flour over the whole thing and kneaded huge amounts of dough at a time, then when she was done, she took the board away, washed it off, and left the counter clean. Not so in my apartment: I grab flour, pour it all over my kitchen counter, spoon the dough-to-be out of the mixing bowl, and start pushing the stuff together like it’s a stress ball.

I follow the “geek method” of kneading, which is this: Slap the dough on the table and spread it out with both your hands going away from you, creating an equilateral triangle (60 degrees at each corner). If necessary, lay some flour in the center, and then flip one end of the triangle over on to another, creating a right angle triangle (90 degrees at the right angle, then 60 degrees at the meeting ends and 30 at the folded one). Then fold the folded end in towards the opposite one, turn it so to the tip is facing you, and push the whole thing out again to make another equilateral triangle. This way, in your head, you can build a Sierpinski Triangle! Geeky, I know, but if it was cool, they’d call it the “cool method.”

So by now you should have added the original 3 cups of flour, 3 more cups in mixing, and probably another cup or two in kneading. Your dough should be pretty doughy, and not very sticky at all. Not like my dough. My dough is actually still very sticky, but I’m so busy thinking about triangles and geekiness, I don’t even really notice. I knead for about 15 minutes, and then put the bread back into the mixing bowl, cover it with a damp paper towel, and toss the whole thing into the unlit oven to rise.

Let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. I went and played the Arc the Lad game for PS2, which I wasn’t really impressed with. But I did get it for free from Blockbuster by trading in a few crappy DVDs, so I got no complaints.

45 minutes later, I pull out my bread, only to see it hasn’t risen at all. Wellll crap. Ok well maybe it rose a little bit, but I’m imagining a bubble of bread, a behemoth of dough that could feed a small country. I think I did something wrong already.

Not to mention that every bread recipe I’ve ever seen extolls the great joy and pleasure of “punching down the dough.” This is something I’ve never done, because I don’t think I’ve ever made bread right. The idea is that once your bread rises, you’re supposed to punch the air out of your dough with a fist, and doing this releases not only a satisfying sound (plop? never heard it), but also puts you on the train to smellville, where you’ll experience smells never before experienced in your kitchen.

Expecting greatness, I make a fist, swing back, and come down to knock the air out of my dough like it was a fat guy messing with my girlfriend at a bar. Instead, all I get is a fist covered with dough. Apparently, not only does my dough not have any air in it, it’s still sticky. Soon, I’ve got half risen dough covering both hands, and every time I try to pull it off, more sticks to me.

At this point in Brad’s recipe, you’re supposed to split the dough into two and save for later. Cursing, I manage to split the dough into three– 1/3 of it ends up in the ziploc bag I’ve procured to freeze the leftover dough in, another 1/6 ends up all over my hands and arms from me trying to desperately shove sticky dough into the bag, and the rest sits in the mixing bowl. I was supposed to “punch down the dough!” I feel like the jerk in the middle of Karate Kid who threatens and then throws a punch at Ralph Macchio, only to find that he’s messing with a ninja-in-training.

Sheesh. I zip the baggie, shove it in the fridge, wash my hands, and decide to forge ahead anyway. Butter a breadpan, put the dough in it, and preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Brad also jokes that you can slit the top of the loaf however you’d like it– I’m boring, and I just put one cut right down the center. Next time I’ll have to write my name or something.

Oven preheated, put the pan in and bake for 35-45 minutes. More Arc the Lad. Actually, I think as I get some time in playing the game, the battle system isn’t too bad. The voicework is lacking, though.

35 minutes later, the smell of fresh baked bread wafts through my apartment. I pull out the loaf to find out that everything is fine– it hasn’t quite risen as much as it should, but I did actually get some rising action out of it. Cool for 10 minutes, and then, since I buttered the pan, the loaf slids right out of there.

I grab a breadknife, cut a slice, and layer it with peanut butter. Terrific! I could use some practice on making sure the dough is ready, but other than that, the great tasting loaf of bread on my table means the first outing of I Require Sustenance is a success!

Have a recipe for me to try next time? Send it here!