Tuesdays with Dorie - White Loaf

I love baking and Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan is the best baking book I own. A website was set up where various people baked their way through this book (it took them years!) and they have now finished it and so have moved on to another Dorie book, Baking with Julia. I thought now that I am blogging that I'd have a go at trying to keep up with them and bake my way through the book. I've had it for well over a year and haven't baked anything out of it as it all looks very complicated.

The first challenge was a white loaf. I must admit I am not a breadmaker. I have a breadmaking machine and I love it, why would I do it by hand? Well this seemed the best place to start.

The recipe said it made two loaves and as they are only fresh for a couple of days this seemed far too much for my family of three so I halved the recipe and made one.

I used my mixer with a dough hook to do most of the kneading as it says you can in the book. The dough didn't seem that 'alive' to me though. My yeast is very old (way past it's sell by date) but is fine in my breadmaker so I don't think that is it (I could of course be totally wrong!). Anyway, the rising seemed to go well.

Here it is ready to go in the oven all lovely and risen.

And here is the end result.

I must admit I wasn't overly keen. The crust was very crusty (a bit too hard for me!) and I had a couple of slices the night it was made planning to use it the next day for sandwiches. The next day it was inedible, all dried up and hard so it ended up going in the bin which was a total waste!

I'm glad I had a go at it though and do look forward to making the other breads in the book, I'll be making them the day I plan to eat them in future though. Head on over to the Tuesdays with Dorie website to look at all the other white loaves.