At Last!

My regular blog readers know that my recent attempts at bread making have run the gamut from exceptionally horrible to simply, “Well THAT, didn’t work…”

One bread that I’ve always been successful with in the past has been a family recipe Shredded Wheat Bread.

shredded-wheat-bread1

And, if you’ve been reading this blog you’ll know that they don’t stock or sell shredded wheat here. SO, I searched on line for something else. I wanted a no-knead recipe. Counter space here at this house is VERY limited and I’ve even tried following instructions on how to knead bread in the bowl which wasn’t very successful.

I thought, perhaps, I could substitute oatmeal for the shredded wheat and there are actually a ton of recipes online for no-knead oatmeal bread. Don’t ask me why, but I decided to try THIS one out. Perhaps because is was one of the first ones that came up when I did a Google search.

NO KNEAD OATMEAL BREAD Printed from COOKS.COM

1 c. firmly packed dark brown sugar 1 tbsp. salt
1 3/4 c. old fashioned rolled oats
3 c. boiling water

2 tbsp. butter
1 pkg. dry yeast
1/4 c. warm water
6 c. all purpose flour

In a large bowl, stir together sugar, salt and oats. Add boiling water and butter, let stand until lukewarm.

Sprinkle yeast into 1/4 cup warm water and stir until dissolved. Add yeast mixture to oat mixture. Stir in flour 1 cup at a time. Dough will be sticky.

Transfer to a greased bowl, cover bowl with plastic wrap, and let rise until doubled in bulk. Lift and drop dough 3 to 4 times.

Grease 2 (9 x 5 x 3) loaf pans and divide dough into 2 equal portions. Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled in bulk. Bake in preheated 450 degree oven for 10 minutes. Lower oven to 350 degrees and bake for another 45 minutes or until bread sounds hollow when tapped with your finger. Remove bread immediately from pans and cool on wire racks.

So I decided to give it a whirl. It wasn’t easy getting all six cups of flour into the dough, but eventually it made it, and this is what I got:

IMG_0747

I put the lid on it and let it sit for an hour and a bit until it looked like this:

IMG_0749

I divided the dough, as per instructions into two loaf pans:

IMG_0750

Now, I’m all by myself and two loaves of bread are more than I’m going to be able to get through before one of them goes stale so I put one in the freezer. When I was living in Florida we used to buy several bags of pre-made pizza dough at the Publix supermarket and put them in the freezer for later. When they were thawed out, and it usually took close to a full day to thaw out and then to rise, so I figured I’d try it with this. If it came out to be another failure I’d just be able to chuck the stuff in the freezer, and if it worked out well then I’d have something to look forward to.

I followed the baking instructions and got this:

IMG_0755

epic-win

Comments Off on At Last!

Filed under Uncategorized

Comments are closed.