Thursday, 29 May 2014

Breaking Bread

I am going to interrupt the Mum and Lovey stories (there are several more million photos of tourist attractions to subject you to yet) with some breaking news: Eoin and I are now bakers.

Bread in Singapore is... OK. The packaged bread is awful - sweet and buttery (they are filled with milk, and the bread for toasting has butter already in or something), no texture and keeps a disturbingly long time. Bread from bakeries can be better - no delicious tasty sourdoughs or anything - mostly standard white bread, but at least you can get a bit of crust... for about an hour. After that, the high humidity here really starts to affect the crust and crumb of the bread (listen to me using all my baking terms - I've definitely been watching too much Great Australian/British Bake Off). In other words, the bread goes stale pretty quick, so within half a day it tastes like you have 2 day old bread. 

Our first solution had been going to the bakery daily, but then we hatched a genius plan - OUR OWN BREADMAKER! It's awesome, too, even though our bread maker selection criteria extended only to "which one is cheapest?". We've done about 3 loaves so far, and while it does take a while (3-4 hours), it's been great to have hot fresh bread that tastes like real bread. I present our first masterpiece...

It's READY! The bun is in the oven. There is no subtext in that statement, don't get excited.
It came out of the tin, and you can knock on it and it sounds hollow.
Crumbs! A little doughy, but held up.
It's... delicious. 
We've tried a few flours and a few recipes so far (only one disastrous loaf, which was nearly too salty to eat), and the best one we've tried so far is here. We didn't do the pre-fermentation with the yeast, just chucked everything in the machine, went to bed and woke up to a deliciously light and crusty Sunday morning breakfast.

NOTE: I believe that you should all give me internet-based pats on the back for resisting the massive temptation to make this whole post nothing but bread/baking puns. I rose above the temptation.

2 comments:

Mum said...

:)
MMMMmmmmmmm, hot bread smells in the internet. I expect a massive loss of productivity and a great rise in national happiness if you could emit baking bread smells from hot computers.

Unknown said...

Haaha! Keep the puns rolling.