I heart breadmaking

Too much bun, but still fun.

I never tire of reading about breadmaking. The New York Times recently ran an article by the brilliant Harold McGee entitled, "Better bread with less kneading", which gave me a refresher course on my beloved hobby as well as quite a bit of new information. You can never learn too much about breadmaking.

There's a simple white bread I make so regularly, I don't need to look at the recipe anymore. It's the bread I make when I want something reliable and with a tender closed crumb that's suitable for sandwiches but don't want store-bought "plastic" sliced bread. This time, I wanted to make buns for a project that Veggie Chick and I are currently preparing for.

So easy I can make this bread with my eyes closed? Don't trust me on that. I should have had them wide open when reaching for my flour.

For a person who bakes so often, it is with a sense of embarrassment that I admit to using the wrong type of flour for the bun you see in the picture above. Instead of all-purpose, I used cake flour. Granted, all my flour containers are alike but they are labelled – not very well, it would appear.

Cake flour is soft and has little gluten-forming proteins and is not used in breads. According to baking911 (lots of interesting flour information on this site, even if the layout is a bit hard on the eyes), this will cause the bread to fall because it requires a stronger structure that can trap the gases created by yeast, allowing the bread to rise.

As you can see from the picture, however, my buns still rose – but that could have been because of the tin I had used. It was a little too small for the amount of dough I had made and probably forced the dough upwards. Notice, though, how the base is a little too dense and somewhat gummy looking? I actually had to put the bread back into the oven, upside-down, after I removed it from the baking tin so that the bottom could cook properly.

But I'm still happy since I used my new digital scale for the first time – wonderful contraption that. Try weighing 10g of yeast with my old scale, one of those plastic things – it wouldn't even have registered!

Shredded chipotle roast beef on white bread with macerated cherry tomatoes, pineapple salsa and butterhead lettuce.