First time Bread Making Adventure

So here we go - my first ever posting to my very own blog! Last night I attempted to bake bread for the very first time ever! I'm quite excited about this progression since one of my good friends seems to be quite good at baking bread and has vast amounts of knowledge about anything bread related. I found the easiest recipe I could find in any of my cookbooks which happened to be a loaf of "City Bread" from Chef Michael Smith's cookbook "Chef at Home".

The ingredients were really simple - flour, salt, yeast and water. Simple is good! I didn't follow the instructions exactly since I wanted to use quick rise yeast (not sure if this is a bad thing) because I didn't want to wait 12-14 hours for my dough to rise (instant gratification much?!)! Soooo it seems to have worked out alright... the dough rose up so nicely in my big bowl and was very light and fluffy.

After minimal kneading the next step was to put this dough into the pan I would be baking it in... well, I only have one loaf pan, which turned out to be much too small... so I have a VERY tall loaf of bread on my hands! I will be investing in a larger loaf pan shortly so I can continue experimenting with bread. First pic is of my dough in my small loaf pan - looking so nice before being put into a hot oven:

I baked the loaf in the oven for about 35 minutes until doing the "knock test" to see if the bread was done resulted in a nice hollow sound indicating that the bread was in fact done.

Here are a few pictures of the finished product - it was late at night, so no exciting presentation here... just plain and simple pictures. :)

If anyone has any bread making wisdom to impart, please by all means share by commenting on this post! The end result of this recipe was far from perfect, but tasted pretty fantastic if I do say so myself!


Thanks for taking the time to read this post (or even just look at the pictures)! More culinary adventures to follow this weekend.