Behind me there is a bread machine intoning the near end of the bread baking cycle. Or perhaps alerting me to the fact that it is lonely and that no one has been paying it any attention. When people tell me they never bake bread because of a lack of a machine, I just wave my hands at them. Everybody's got a set!
Bread machines kind of fascinate me. I'm not allowed to open the machine while the cycle is going, so I can't get a good look into the actual happenings of the process like I can when I make bread by hand. In fact, I have only used a machine myself on one occasion, that being my visit to my sister in March. She got married in August 2010--that will make it so easy to remember how long she's been married, score!--and had received a bread machine that she had no idea how to work. I wanted to make handmade bread for her and her husband, but she rightly pointed out that she would be more likely to use the convenience of a machine that would make bread for her so she could come home from class and snack on homemade bread immediately. Which is a fair point. Most of my recipes are slow rise, so they take a while, but are excellent for apartment bound study days!
Anyhow. I bought the yeast for her, since it's pricey and I knew she wouldn't want to cough up the money without knowing how it would turn out, and we decided to make the simplest recipe in the little booklet that came with the machine. It was a plain white bread with egg, and I was a little unsure of the proportions. But, again, I had never used a machine, so I figured they knew what they were saying. We deposited the wet ingredients in first--which was weird--then the dry, and finally the yeast. We closed the top, hit a button, and watched the tiny paddle at the bottom begin to mush up the dough. For being only about an inch and a half big, that paddle sure could get the dough moving.
We retreated to the coffee table to play more Munchkin while we waited.
I'm not certain we actually finished the game, perhaps it was the second or third game we were in the middle of, but eventually the bread maker asserted its presence with an insistent beep that we both initially mistook for the fire alarm. Thankfully we were wrong and were instead rewarded with savory sniffs of fresh bread. The bucket pan inside was piping hot, so we let it sit open for a bit before we pulled it out and up ended the loaf onto a wire rack.
We then let it cool for twenty minutes to let the gluten networks firm up. As one should always do.
Delicious! And makes great toad in a hole!
American style, that is.
What's toad in a hole?
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