Tag Archives: bread

Mrs. Gildersleeve’s Buns

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Mr. Aitch and I like love bread but we don’t like the typical store bought variety, you know the prepackaged sliced stuff. It’s almost like eating paste.

I’ve baked bread many, many, many times and sometimes it’s really good and other times, well, it’s dense and heavy. So I did some research and found lots of “light and airy” bread recipes that call for scalded milk and/or eggs.

Kitchn.com answers the scalded milk question: The whey protein in milk can weaken gluten and prevent the dough from rising properly. Scalding the milk deactivates the protein so this doesn’t happen.

This from LEAF explains the addition of eggs: The fat in egg yolks helps shorten the gluten strands in bread dough, increasing the gluten’s elasticity. This results in a more tender crumb and softer crust in the finished bread. Additionally, the coagulating property of eggs, due to their protein, helps create a more tender and even texture. As a leavening agent, the eggs contribute to the bread dough rising higher than a non-egg yeast bread.

Maybe you bakers already know those things and I might have learned them in junior high home ec. classes but that was a very, very long time ago.

I looked through several cookbooks I have and found a recipe named “Mrs. Gildersleeve’s Buns” in a fund-raiser cookbook from my hometown. The recipes in this collection were tried and true. Plus I liked the name.

I whipped up a batch of this bread Wednesday afternoon and Mr. Aitch “baked” it on the grill over indirect heat. It is light and fluffy and tastes so good that we had to sample some as soon as it was cool enough to cut.

I will be making this recipe again. And again. And again…

Click here for Mrs. Gildersleeve’s Buns recipe.

Patti

Snobs

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Mr. Aitch and I are snobs.

Bread snobs.

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We can barely eat mass-produced bread from the store.  Most of it feels gummy and tastes, well, tasteless.

The texture of bread is known as the crumb and it can be open or close.  Open has a lot of texture and close doesn’t.  Most store-bought mass-produced breads have a close crumb. IMHO that equates to the gumminess.  That’s all I know about bread baking but it’s enough for me to know.

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In my experience most store-bought mass-produced bread is full of preservatives which can be good as the bread doesn’t mold as quickly.  Locally baked breads from our local bakers tend not to use preservatives in their bread.  Their bread has more texture like what my grandmother used to bake.  One problem is that it molds quickly.  Unrefrigerated and you’ve got maybe 2-3 days before it gets fuzzy.

We don’t eat a like of sliced bread in our house so the solution we came up with involves frozen bread dough.  Yes, it still has preservative in it but we get the texture we like and can have freshly baked bread and rolls every day or two.

Our oven stays off during the summer.  It’s the Mr. Aitch Law in our house.  So how do we get freshly baked bread and rolls?

The gas grill.

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We only bake enough that the two of us can eat within a few days.

Rolls

Since we grill almost every day, it’s not a problem to do bread, or rolls, or hamburger buns, or pepperoni rolls, or cinnamon rolls when we need/want them.

bread

The smell of freshly baked bread just makes me hungry.  🙂