Basic Bread

I have never made anything requiring yeast, at least before today. Having a free afternoon, I figured why not try. Now that I've got a Kitchen Aid stand mixer at my disposal this should be pretty easy.

Firsts I measured out all my ingredients so that I'd be ready to add whatever, whenever.

However, I got a little overzealous about working with yeast and spend 5 minutes trying to make sure my water was the right temperature for activating the yeast before I realized I needed to combine my milk, butter, salt and sugar over low heat and then let it cool to lukewarm. Luckily I hadn't dumped the yeast in yet. Here's the milk and butter mixture...

Now I finally get to dissolve the yeast.

Next I just combined all the ingredients and let the mixer do all the work. Then came the part I was nervous about, whether or not the dough would rise. Being my first attempt I was fairly confident (that I could follow the recipe, but not that it would work). See the results for yourself though.

It lives!

I let it rise for an hour, punched it down and divided it. Goofed on rolling out the first loaf, corrected for the second. Placed them in the bread pans and let it rise another hour and then baked them for 30 minutes while Ayda and I took a stroll around the neighborhood and got some ideas about the steps leading down to the lake.

After they baked I was left with one very nice looking (and smelling) loaf and one misfit. Though I'm sure the misfit will taste just fine!

Now I'm off to the store to get ingredients for my second cooking adventure of the day: meatloaf!

Dan