My husband sent me an
article about using a slow cooker or croc pot to bake homemade artisan bread in rather than the conventional oven. "This seemed too fun to be true. I must experiment," I thought to myself. I felt that most of my research left me feeling unclear about the first rise of the bread dough... the most important for fluffy, well textured bread. I had no idea which recipe to use so I stuck to my good ole Better Homes & Garden white bread recipe. It's on the page right after the pancake batter soaked one (p. 132 in my book). I figure once I get this technique down, then I shall honor the slow cooker with my FAVORITE challah bread recipe. Mmmm! Just thinking about warm honey challah bread makes me drool.
I decided that I would cut the recipe in half being it was written for two loaves... uhh yeah two loaves coming out of a 4 qt croc pot? I don't think so! I also was too lazy to unpack my new bag of white sugar so I used brown instead. I feel it would give a hint of molasses. I am not sure if I actually tasted it or just imagined. Probably the latter. Perhaps I will use actual molasses sometime to make bread. (Note to self: make sticky bun dough with molasses)
Recipe (Augmented version of Better Homes and Garden White Bread Recipe):
3-4ish cups of white flour
1 pack of dry yeast
9 oz buttermilk- 1 cup and a shot glass
1 TBSP brown sugar
1 TBSP butter
3/4 tsp salt
Mix 1 1/4 cup flour with yeast in a large mixing bowl and set aside.
In a sauce pan over low heat, warm milk sugar, butter, and salt to about 120-130 degrees F. (the recipe says the butter should just start to melt. You do not EVER want to over warm your liquid that you activate your yeast with. If it is too hot you will kill the yeast and have lovely flat bread.)
Pour your milk mixture into the bowl with the flour and yeast. Stir it up until you have a gross looking sticky icky paste. You should be able to smell the yeast activate. It kinda has an undercooked sweet smell to it. Learn this scent! It will help you in a wonderful future of bread breaking. You can also wait to see if it will bubble but I do not have the patience for that.
When the mixture is smooth and sticky begin to slowly add more of the flour. (HINT: if you do not buy the fluffy bread flour which is a bit more expensive, sift your regular flour before you add it. It will allow for a silkier texture) I dumped in a heaping cup and was quite satisfied with how the texture started to clump together into a firmer sticky dough. When the dough gets too difficult to mix with a spoon (wooden is best) dump it out on a floured surface and kneed for 6-8 minutes. Your dough should be firm and feel like the fleshy underside of your forearm. (If you are a drummer or an athlete do not use this metaphor. Your dough will be too firm at that point!) On to the next and second most important step.
The First Rise! This is the part that I messed up. I read that one blogger let her rough rise in the croc pot itself on the lowest setting. "Hmm what a speedy idea," I thought! Nope, wrong! BAD idea! She must have had a nice super low setting because my dough started to bake! OOOPS! Next time I will turn the pot on low, place the greased ball of dough in for two minutes, and promptly turn it OFF! The proper way to let your bread rise is to find a nice warm spot, place the dough in a greased container, put some plastic wrap on top so it doesn't dry out and let it be until it doubles in size. If you put it somewhere too warm, the yeast will die, your bread will flop, you will cry. The end. Just do it right and be patient. You can even let it rise in the fridge all night if you want according to some bakers on the interwebs.
Third stage, finally! Once your dough has doubled in size, punch the bugger down. Dump it out on the counter with a little flour and shape it into a happy little ball. Grease up the edges of your slow cooker or line it with parchment and plop that bugger back in there. Set the temperature to high, place the lid on, set your timer, and walk away. The blog article that inspired this experiment suggested setting the timer for 45 minutes but allowing the bread up to an hour to
cook er umm I mean bake. The top will now get brown and may be a pasty turn off. To remedy that they and many others suggest popping the bread in the real oven under the broiler for a wee bit. But that defeats the whole no oven thing. I had no choice with my bread but to do that. Because I ruined the first rise it was VERY dense and needed so TLC time in the oven to dry out and get a healthier color.
Once the bread is all finished let it cool, cut, butter, devour! If creating a circle loaf of bread and you want to have evenish slices, cut it using a fish tale technique. My brother taught me this from his job at Great Harvest Bread Company. You cut off the end, then slice it in an alternating diagonal fashion leaving you with fairly even sized slices of bread that will have one rounded edge and one cropped one. I didn't use this technique because I was lazy and wanted yummy bread in my tummy asap! My impatience also lead to me not letting my bread cool well enough so I had some dense soft spots through out. Oh the many errors of my ways. None the less, it tasted great. The butter milk really adds a nice sourness to the bread and as I noted before I swear there was an imagined molasses hint to it. Now on to pictures.
My poor abused cook book.
The first rise about to fail.
Dense and pathetic cutting. The edges touching the ceramic croc do get a lovely brown color.
A little shot of the pale top but decent enough texture in the middle.
More texture of the middle. The bubbles should have been bigger but I killed the yeast in the first rise.
A nice shot of the browned edge. It had a nice crisp crust to the bottom.
All in all, I am not sad with the end result. I will try again but tweak my recipe and technique. Perhaps if I am not too fatigued I will blog Slow Cooker Bread experiment no.2 for the ineterwebs viewing pleasure. I have even read of a rumored slow cooker chocolate cake recipe. It's possible that is in my future as well.
