Here y` go Hugh! Another one to steal!
Cheers, Vic. Got it!
H
Hi Keith,
I am just now baking a rye bread. (I’m German of course!) 
I’ll eat it with a toast to you!
juh
Argh! Actually I should have mentioned Germany too… I had some lovely bread during a weekend in Frankfurt. And you have good cheese, too (which we do have in the UK - although great for bread, America is terrible for cheese).
And you forgot to tell me the recipe!
yum… so tasty 
I love bread. Good bread. And here, in Melbourne Australia, we have lots of good bread. There is a bakery 30 seconds walk from my house. It’s barely average, almost British by Keith’s description, but it’s there. The greengrocer, just 15 seconds walk from our house, sells awesome bread. I don’t know why. There are at least 2 bakery cafes within a 1 minute walk that sell great bread, a supermarket that sells OK bread and another supermarket that sells an astounding selection of wonderful breads (but it’s closer to 4 minutes away, it takes commitment to go there).
Why am I telling you this? It’s not to tease Keith, although that does have an appeal. No, it’s to give Keith vicarious pleasure in my misfortune: my wife has decided we are on a diet. No bread.
No bread!
Oh sure, I can go buy it on my own. My wife says that’s fine. Luckily, I’ve been married long enough to see the lie. And lived long enough to know that the imposed marital guilt, and the stale bread in the freezer (ever tried eating a loaf of fresh sour-dough rye on your own in one sitting? Don’t!), last too long to be worth it.
So I wake each morning to the smell of the bakery. And walk past the green grocery and their fancy bread (no, I really don’t know why) And see the fresh croissants in our favourite cafe (some of the best in Melbourne) and try to ignore the hurt look in the baker’s eye as I say “just a coffee today”. Because I don’t. Eat. Any.
After reading Keith’s piece, I wish I lived in the UK. At least then it wouldn’t matter…
Mr Blount,
This thread is turning pornographic; a paean in fact, to the unbridled lust fuelled, satiation of desires, as enshrined in, 'The Hedonist`s Ten Commandments’
Mr Blount,
Purely for the purposes of psychological profiling, would that be, African or Indian.
Thank you.
Dr Mulality
Without British bread there is no toast and butter. 
My mother used to freeze bread. I hated the aftermath of that.
We are a bit spoiled by all our bread options here in the states. In Vermont it seems there is a boutique bakery in every town. But it hasn’t always been that way. Thirty years ago I spent a year bicycling around the country and once out of the northeast it was almost impossible to find anything on a grocery shelf but Wonder Bread. If you’ve never had Wonder Bread let’s just say you haven’t missed anything. Wonder Bread is good for one thing: Rolling it into tight little dough balls for use as projectiles in a food fight. If you were ever unfortunate enough to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder Bread, well, you might still be trying to unglue your tongue from the roof of your mouth – a good remedy for that fellatio problem, I suppose.
Steve
Snort bakes all our bread from scratch. No bread maker, just a mixer and an oven. We got disgusted with US bread when we started looking at causes for some issues and realized that the store breads available to us were more chemical than bread. Now we can’t eat bread anywhere but home.
I can give you a recipe or two, but we found that it is the ingredients more than the recipe that determine success. The big ones are:
- Fresh yeast. Got to have it.
- Supply of high gluten flour. This is what give the springiness to the bread.
- Consistent oven temperature. Use a thermometer IN the oven, not the dial gauge.
- Room temperature supplies. #1 above is very temp sensitive.
- Time. You just can’t rush it.
That said, we buy all local flour in bulk (50lb bags of all purpose, high gluten, 25lb for specialty flours like rye), yeast from a local producer, eggs from local hens (starting our own flock of hens right now), but butter from the supermarket. We go through 50lb of flour in a 2 week interval. We really don’t save any money, but we are all much heather and eat less (quality over quantity).
As to recipes, look into the books by Father Dominic. Everything from basic white bread to meat pastries. His apple braids are amazing. Snort has won at least one (but I think there are 2) baking “competitions” using his recipes (yes she credited him with the recipe). If you are really desperate for an immediate fix I will get snort to tell me her current white bread method. Then you just swap out 3/4 cup of the white flour for 3/4 cup rye flour to get rye bread (for stronger flavor increase the swap amount).
That explains why KB was doing … um … what he was doing. I can’t imagine the elephants getting too upset over that.
The best place in the world to live is over a bakery.
In a bakery might be better. Today we are making a danish sweet bread and molasses cookies (we call them “mole butts”). The smell sticks in your clothes when you leave he house. Mmmmm…
mole BUTTS? they must look appetising!
How awful for you What on earth did the aftermath taste like.
I`m shocked you even considered it.
I thought that was supposed to be, 'Over a bordello".
Take care
Fluff
And I hate* all of you for being able to eat bread!
Tanja
*not really of course… I really miss bread!
Umm, no. I expected more of you. Molasses cookies. Think about it for a moment.
Miss PInk
Mol asses=Rodents bottoms, is what Numpty means. But ys already sussed that…dint y?