I took the bread class at the local Sur La Table on Saturday. I gave the class 10 for information and fun, 7 for organization. It was a little disorganized, but I had a blast and I learned a great deal.

The class was taught by Stephany Buswell, a baker at Beckmann’s, a local bakery. When I bought bread—haven’t bought it for months! go me!—I bought Beckmann’s. We made walnut bread, focaccia, and cinnamon rolls and sticky buns from the same batch of sweet dough.

All of them: excellent. I’m not a big fan of nut breads, but the walnut bread was pretty tasty. And Darin bit into the focaccia, said, “Wow, I don’t usually like focaccia, but this is great!” and proceeded to rip a huge bit more off. And the cinnamon rolls—note to Rob and Laura: these were the rolls I wanted to make for breakfast that morning. I will try again! I have practice now!

We were grouped into threes. The other woman in my trio was also the mother of a five-year-old and a three-year-old, which I found amusing. She’d had problems with making bread in the past, because it always came out too dense. The curse of homemade bread! Too much flour. In fact, I usually err on the side of having too liquidy a dough, figuring I’m going to add more during the folding process.

The last member of our threesome was a guy who’d obviously made lots of breads: he knew how to knead. Me, I ended up with hands covered with dough, but man, this guy knew how to work it. (Key tips: keep fingers out of it. Only use palms. And lift and turn the dough frequently so it doesn’t glom onto the board.)

So I learned a lot about what properly kneaded dough should look like (I’ve been pretty close, but I’ve often not kneaded enough), how to roll bread and form a boule, how to form one of those cool windowpanes, how to properly flour your working surface (you sort of pitch from the side—Stephany was amazing the way she could poof the flour over the board), and how to scatter rosemary on focaccia bread. Okay, that last one wasn’t so hard.

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I have finally settled on my favorite white sandwich bread recipe, and it comes from my current favorite cookbook, How to be a Domestic Goddess. It’s Nigella’s “Essential White Loaf” recipe, and it’s just great. It’s the only white bread recipe I’ve made that contains no sugar (shout out to Bakerina) and it’s insanely moist, undoubtedly because of one of the additions: instant mashed potatoes! Actually, Nigella recommends using “potato water,” but if you don’t have that around, use instant mashed potatoes.

I made this bread for the first time last Sunday—we are currently on loaf #5. It’s crazy. But it’s unbelievably delicious. It’s the first recipe I made that has reliably come out as sandwich bread size, and with yummy moistness. Check it out (directions mine, since I’ve gotten into the bread-making groove now):

3 1/2 cups white bread flour, plus more for kneading
1 tablespoon fresh yeast, or 1 package rapid rise yeast
1 tablespoon salt
1 1/3 cups warm water
1 tablespoon instant mashed potatoes, added to water
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened

1. Mix flour, water, potato, yeast. Autolyse.

2. Add salt and butter. Knead.

3. First rise.

4. Preheat oven to 425F.

5. Punch-down and shape into a 9×5 loaf pan.

6. Second rise.

7. Bake for 35 minutes. Check for doneness. Take loaves out of their pans, put on oven rack for another 5 or so.

Update 5/19/05: For a few weeks, I thought the bread I was making had suddenly become way too dry, and I’ve decided the problem was that I was letting the sponge sit too long (for the sponge I mixed everything except half the water and the salt, I think). So I went back to mixing everything together, no autolyse, and kneading until I get the gluten window, not necessarily until the dough makes a nice tight ball. In fact, the dough is usually still a little goopy and sticky when I put it in the proofing bucket. I figure I’m going to add more flour when I shape the dough into the pans for the second rise anyhow, and I’d rather have underfloured dough than overfloured (which leads to tough bread). My bread has returned to being gloriously moist for days, so for this recipe: no sponge! no autolyse! knead until you get the gluten window and not a moment longer!

Yum.

The Amateur Gourmet, foodie and musical theater buff, has re-enacted the climactic scene from Miss Saigon with eggs. Yes. Eggs. Yes, I laughed. Yes, it’s 12:30am and I can’t sleep. But it’s still funny.

I had a whole bunch of bananas slowly going black in my kitchen, and I said to myself, “Self, what should we do with all these bananas?” I whipped open How To Be A Domestic Goddess and thought Nigella’s recipe for Banana Bread sounded good, except it had raisins—golden raisins, to be exact; sultanas, if you’re on the other side of the Pond—and I’m not terribly fond of raisins in my food. Then I noticed at the bottom that she had a note about making a version of this for some of her friends, substituting cocoa for some of the flour and adding chocolate chips.

Well, okay, Nigella, if you insist:

1 cup plain flour

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

125g unsalted butter, melted

150g sugar

2 large eggs

4 small, very ripe bananas (about 300g weighed without skins), mashed

4 ounces chocolate chips

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325ºF. Put the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium-sized bowl and combine well — stirring with a wooden spoon worked just fine for me. Once the dry ingredients are combined, then stir in the chocolate chips and get them coated.

Mash the bananas in a second bowl — you could go all out and use a food processor to reduce them to a liquid or cream, but I used a potato masher and ended up with some lumps of banana in the mixture, which turned out great.

In a large bowl, mix the melted butter and sugar and beat until blended. Beat the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture one at a time, then the mashed bananas. Then, with your wooden spoon, stir in the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture, a third at a time, stirring well after each bit.

Scrape into the loaf pan and bake in the middle of the oven for 1 to 1 and a quarter hours. (I made two loaves at once, and the hour and 15 minutes worked perfectly.) When it’s done, an inserted toothpick or fine skewer should come out cleanish — surprisingly, even though I’d used chocolate chips, no chocolate came out on the toothpick. Leave in the pan on a rack to cool.

This was delicious — very banana, very chocolate, not gooey. The chocolate chips were even distributed through the cake, which was great. I will definitely make this one again—it took approximately ten minutes to throw together, and then all I had to do was wait for it to bake. In fact, I left it in the pan to cool overnight, so it made an excellent breakfast treat in the morning.

I made two loaves (lots of bananas), so Darin took one to work. One of his team members yelled, “Cake!” and within seconds the entire loaf was gone.

I might try a little extra cocoa powder next time, for a much more chocolate taste to the bread, or maybe I’ll get some black cocoa from King Arthur and try that out.