Bread-Bakers v006.n013.11

In Bread Digest V6 #12, Elizabeth Schwartz asked if anybody had clever
bread-slicing tips.

The best thing I ever did for my bread-slicing was to buy a big knife.
I'd been using steak knives or dinner knives to cut bread, and often
I'd end up with squished, feathered, messy slices of bread.  A big bread
knife (of the cheap variety) can cut all the way across the loaf at
once, which makes much neater slices.


Laura Brito says that using exact amounts of room temperature ingredients
is very important for her Hitatchi.

Interesting... my Welbilt (until it died) consistently made good bread
with ingredients that mostly came right out of the fridge and weren't
measured terribly carefully.  Maybe the cold ingredients didn't matter
because it has two kneading cycles, with a rising time in between, which
lets the dough come up to room temperature.  (Does the Hitachi do that?)
And maybe the imprecise measuring didn't matter because I generally
checked the consistency of the bread as it's kneading and add liquid or
flour until it looks right.


And Mary Curtis reports she has had trouble rolling out pizza dough and
getting it to stay flat and pizza-shaped.

I'm not a terribly huge fan of pizza so I've only made it in my bread maker
once or twice, but it's worked OK for me.  A number of books say that if
you let the dough rise for the full amount of time, it will be stubbornly
resistant to being rolled into a pizza shape.  My Welbilt came with
instructions to take out the dough after the first kneading and let the
dough rise in a bowl -- entirely skipping the second kneading and rising
cycles.


Valerie Mates
popcorn@cyberspace.org