Losing the dread of bread

When I had small children underfoot, I was a pretty devoted baker. But I never knew quite how anything I baked might turn out. I threw just about every first batch of cookies I ever made into the trash, bottoms blackened.
As a young stay-at-home mom, I made healthy and sometimes complicated snacks for school parties, birthdays, holidays, etc., with competitive zeal. By the time the kids were teenagers (and I was very much not a stay-at-home mom anymore), I was barely able to keep enough store-bought food on hand to get through a week, much less bake anything, ever from scratch.

Kids are both at college far away now, and for Christmas this year, Dave bought me a KitchenAid standing mixer. I wish I'd owned one decades ago. I've discovered that these days with nicer kitchen tools and no pressure to perform, no children to feed on deadline, I have come to actually enjoy baking, especially bread. In fact, I find it rewarding, relaxing, it's a Zen-like exercise for me. The KitchenAid kneads dough in about 10 minutes (yeah, kneading would be a great upper-body workout for me, but I'm all about cutting corners in the kitchen without cutting down on a certain purity of ingredients I've lately come to treasure. I go to the Y to exercise. I go to the kitchen to just zone out and have a good time.)

The other purchase that changed my life was the gas range and convection oven we bought just before many of our children came home for Thanksgiving last year. Everyone who's spent any money on an oven these days owns one, but among my friends in that category, hardly anyone knows what to do with one. It's easy. Hit the convection button, set the temperature about 25 degrees lower than you would for a standard recipe, and cook for slightly less time. Buy a good guidebook ("Cooking with Convection" by Beatrice Ojakangas is dandy) and get cracking. The deal with convection is that your crusts will become crusty without becoming burned. Your cookies will be flawless. A convection oven takes the risk out of baking, and who among us has time or courage to take risks in the kitchen? Now baking is just pure fun, and I end up with cookies that are the perfect blend of crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. I sometimes mail them off to my children far away, and await grateful text messages in return.

I've made dozens of loaves of bread in the last seven months. In fact, I haven't bought a loaf of bread since the start of the year. I've adapted a recipe from "The Best Recipe"(published by Cook's Illustrated Magazine, a resource I highly recommend) to create my own whole wheat sandwich bread that's healthy but light and sweet, and pretty quick. I've taken a load of liberties here with the cookbook's recipe, I must tell you, to get just what I like as the result. Something fantastic I've discovered is King Arthur Brand white whole wheat flour. It is delicious, 100 percent whole wheat, but nearly white in color, more tasty I think than standard whole wheat flour.

Whole wheat sandwich bread (two loaves)

Set oven to 200 degrees. When temperature is reached, turn off the oven.

In the bowl of your KitchenAid mixer, use bread hook attachment to mix 7 cups of flour (four of white whole wheat flour and three of white all-purpose flour) with four teaspoons salt.In a four-cup Pyrex measure, mix two cups cold milk with 2/3 cups boiling water, 4 tablespoons melted butter, a half cup of honey and two packages rapid-rise yeast. Stir with a whisk.Slowly add liquid to flour mixture and knead at low speed for 10 minutes. (If kneading by hand, knead for 10 minutes, good for you.) Turn dough onto floured surface, knead in a bit more flour to create a easy-to-handle ball. Butter a mixing bowl and put the dough in, roll to coat on all sides. Put into the oven to rise for one hour, until about doubled in size.Grease two loaf pans with no-transfat Crisco and coat with flour. Be sure to grease the top rim of the pans to prevent sticking. When dough is risen, divide into two balls.

Flatten each to create a 9-inch-by-six-inch oblong shape. Roll dough to create a loaf, pinching seam to seal. Fill loaf pans with dough, seam side down, pushing dough to each side of pans. Cover, let rise 30 minutes more. Brush each loaf with mixture of one teaspoon water and a beaten egg white. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds or poppy seeds. Bake 35-40 minutes at 350 in a convection oven until a wooden skewer inserted in the loaf comes out clean. Cool on wire racks.When loaves are cool, put each into a freezer bag. Freeze one. Eat the other over the course of the next week-- it will stay good for several days.