To make bread or to not make bread

Edwardia

Lakeland does Claybrooke Mill organic dough improver 200g 7.99 but presumably it lasts a while as they say add a teaspoon or two.

http://www.lakeland.co.uk/11682/Claybrooke-Mill-Dough-Improver

lindseykim13

Unless you really only need 2 slices at a time there is no reason why you can't freeze the whole loaf, thats what we do. Buy it reduced then bung in the freezer, i take it out in the morning or the evening before and it's fine for lunch and lasts a day or 2.
I have just sold my breadmaker as the loafs aren't nice when you cook it in there and i was just using it for mixing the dough and cooking in the oven. Making your own basic bread is not cheaper at all if you like the fancy stuff, seeded/sour dough ect then it may work out cheaper-i make this in the oven if i ever fancy it.

frugal_shopper_2

Edwardia wrote: »

Lakeland does Claybrooke Mill organic dough improver 200g 7.99 but presumably it lasts a while as they say add a teaspoon or two.

http://www.lakeland.co.uk/11682/Claybrooke-Mill-Dough-Improver

Alternately you can save a couple of quid & order it direct from Claybrook Mill for £5.99 who also sell larger packs which offer bigger savings if required.
http://www.claybrookewatermill.co.uk/conditioners.html

Edwardia

Sainsbury's SO organic wholemeal rolls 4 pack £1 - AFAIK you cant make rolls in a breadmaker and I don't think with all the ingredients I could make organic wholemeal rolls cheaper than the Sainsbo price.

recovering_spendaholic

I have a panasonic breadmaker and I have to say that it makes really nice bread, however you do need to fiddle about with recipes at first until you know what works best in your particular machine. I tend to make pitta bread dough and then roll and bake the pittas myself. They are incredibly cheap to make, particularly if you use Aldi or Lidl breadflour - I get about 16 pittas, which are much nicer than the shop ones, for about 35p I reckon.

SailorSam

Cheap bread costs less in the supermarket. If you want to eat better stuff it's cheaper to make it yourself.
I make a mix of 70%wholemeal and 30% white and reckon it's 45p/50p a loaf.

frugal_shopper_2

Edwardia wrote: »

Sainsbury's SO organic wholemeal rolls 4 pack £1 - AFAIK you cant make rolls in a breadmaker and I don't think with all the ingredients I could make organic wholemeal rolls cheaper than the Sainsbo price.

The So Organic wholemeal seeded rolls would appear to be an average weight of 72g each (based upon the nutritional info as they don't list a product weight on the site) in which case you should be able to make a dozen organic seeded rolls about the same size using just under £1 worth of ingredients if you used the same ingredients or you could shave off a few pence by cutting out the unnecessary ingredients.

You could also improve on their organic status by ignoring the misleading statements made by the retailer highlighted in the ingredients list below.

Ingredients
Wholemeal Wheat Flour, Water, Sugar, Yeast, Palm Oil, Sunflower Seeds (3%), Poppy Seed (3%), Golden Linseed (3%), Wheat Protein, Sea Salt, Soya Flour, Malted Wheat Flour, White Wine Vinegar, Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid.Of the ingredients that can be organic, 100% are organic; Water, Yeast, Sea Salt and Ascorbic Acid cannot be organic

Organic yeast is readily available & is guaranteed to contain no GMO's unlike conventional yeast.
Sea salt certified organic by the soil association is available although how it differs to regular sea salt is a bit of a mystery.
Organic ascorbic acid (vitamin C) is available but as it is a naturally occuring substance the only difference is that it is guaranteed to come from a natural source not from GM corn which an awful lot of ascorbic acid is produced from.

Enterprise_1701C

I make my own bread, but not all the time. I have taken to making ciabatta at the moment, very nice open texture bread.

I make rolls on Saturday's and put all sorts in them, but often things like sun dried tomatoes or cheese and onion. Let the breadmaker do the kneeding then bake the rolls in a very hot oven.

Also, there is nothing like fresh homemade bread with a nice dish full of chilli!

As for how long it lasts - I have absolutely no idea as I have never made any that had chance to even think about going off!

Callie22

Personally I think if you are getting into breadmaking a decent food mixer (like a Kenwood Chef) is better then a breadmaker. My mum is a baker (and I've done a few years of it myself) and to me, all a breadmaker does is bring the factory process home - basically what you get in a mini version of the Chorleywood process in your house. Yes, it's convenient but I think for more people the novelty is the 'really fresh hot bread' rather than the fact that it actually tastes any better than a supermarket loaf. However of course you do have the option to control what goes into your loaf.

But for me, a decent secondhand Kenwood Chef or similar will always trump a breadmaker. It's so much more versatile, there's less faffing, and it really doesn't take any longer to actually make a loaf. You can use less yeast, salt, sugar etc and then give your bread a longer rise, which will give you a much, much better flavour. Making bread this way also does tend to give you a loaf that lasts longer too (not because it's horrible and no-one eats it , but because a loaf that's been made 'properly' won't go stale quite so fast as a 'quick-method' loaf). But this is just my opinion - I will admit that having been a baker I don't feel comfortable just whacking it all in a machine and letting it get on with it. Breadmaking is something of an art and there are so many things (temperature, humidity, different ingredients, moisture levels in your flour etc) can affect your loaf, and I don't feel that machines can cope with the subtlety of it. That's one reason why I think so many people get disheartened with breadmakers because they're just a bit too 'you ALWAYS need 100ml of water and you ALWAYS need x amount of flour', which of course isn't true.

redfox

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