Frugal Friday: Kitchen Tip/Tutorial on Bread Dough

This week I shared with you another great bread recipe that I love for whole grain spelt bread. While I'm certainly no expert, I've been told that I have a talent for making good bread, and making whole grain bread that is healthy as well as delicious has become quite a passion of mine. I've had a lot of bread success, but with that comes some failed attempts as well. Those attempts are discouraging I know. It's especially hard when you try to follow a recipe, but it still just doesn't turn out the way the recipe suggests it should. I've decided in the next few months that I want to share with you information that can help you to become a successful bread maker. There are some secrets that you just can't detail enough in a recipe. And I'd like to share those with you. A few months ago I shared with you a kitchen tip/tutorial all about yeast. If you haven't read it yet, go read it. It's kind of Bread Tutorial 101, and a precurser to what we'll talk about today. Today we're going to talk about adding the correct amount of flour to get the right bread dough consistency.

Bread is a tricky thing because in recipes you can't list the exact amount of flour that you'll need in a recipe. It depends on so many things: humidity, temperature, the type of flour you use, how you measure the flour, etc. So unless you've seen it before, how do you know exactly how much flour that you need? Well today I'm going to eliminate the "guesswork" and show you in a video that I created exactly how much flour you need to make perfect bread.

I created this video this week and I am so excited to share it because this happened to be one of the best batches of bread that I've ever made. It had the perfect amount of flour (and even as much as I make bread that's hard to do every single time). Please excuse the informal quality of the video. I was literally videotaping with one hand while I demonstrated with the other. During parts you can even see the lense cap bobbing back and forth - hee hee. It was the best I had available to me and you can still get the idea even in spite of it's unprofessional quality.

Why am I sharing this for Frugal Friday? I posted about how much money you can save by making your own homemade bread, but that will only work if you actually know how to make it. I hope by sharing this video that it will give you what you need to get started baking your own bread. You can start saving your family money as well as help them eat healthier.



Here's the recipe that I used in the video, but you can use any of the yeast loaf bread recipes on my bread recipe page. They're all great and I love them. There is a little difference for freestanding loaves (like French Bread) and rolls, so look for the tutorial on those to come soon.

Don't have a mixer? Don't worry. You can still make this bread by hand. A friend of mine uses my recipe and makes it by hand and loves the result. You do have to make a few adjustments though. My plan is to demonstrate that in a future kitchen tutorial so stay tuned.

One of my readers shared a comment that I want to share that might help you. She said that she started making their own homemade bread (yes, by hand) and then put the amount that they were saving from buying bread at the store each week into an account. She said that it only took about a year until she had enough saved to buy a Bosch Mixer. What a great idea!

And now I'd love to hear from you. Do you make your own bread? Got any tricks to share?

Happy baking! Have a great weekend.