I bake my own bread.
Normal dutch bread is pretty “fluffy” and light, it’s very easy
to compress but I like heavier bread much more. German bread is usually much heavier, and that’s
what I’ve grown up with.
Solution to the problem was the breadbaking machine I got from my mother, and I’m using it
pretty often, at least once a week. The fun thing is that this machine promotes creativity, plain
bread is easy to make, but it’s just as easy to put some other ingredients into it. My lasts breads
have been bacon bread (baked bacon in it, perfect match with cheese), fruitbread
(dried fruit, such as apple, apricots, prumes, best with plain butter), onion bread
(with fried onions in it, tastes good with everything except sweeter stuff, cheese does very
good, so does bacon). Today I visited the St. Annamolen, a clichee dutch mill where they’re actually
still milling. You can buy all sorts of flours right there, and they seem specialized in providing
bread mixes for bread machines. (And also pet supplies, hi Rinse.) They have about 40 different
sorts of bread mix there, I’ve chosen the “Pommodori bread”, which gave a really good
result, red bread with a strong taste of tomatoes, obviously.
It can be quite tricky to produce a good dough. The right amount of water is crucial, but the
amount of salt and sugar in your ingredients can have a lot of influence, too. Salt makes the yeast
rise less, sugar has the opposite effect. A good measure of thumb is that the dough should be a
little sticky. Well, it’s a science, but recent results show I’m advancing (ask [ade], he serves as some sort of Guinea pig for some
of the experiments). The fun part was trying to get an idea of the effect of sugar, when the dough
found its way outside the bread machine, cleaning the mess afterwards was less fun, though.
Friday, I’ll be leaving for Spain, where I’ll visit a friend near Alicante and head for aKademy about one week later. I’m preparing for the trip
which is finishing my paper, do other paperwork which otherwise might need attention through the
next two weeks, get notebook prepared for all kinds of conference stuff and hacking, wash clothes,
think about the content of my luggage, prepare list of people which I owe a beer… In short boring
and stressful.
I’m looking forward to meeting you in Málaga!