Bread making

For years since I retired I have made bread in a bread maker bought for £10 from a charity shop. It finally died last year so I decided to make bread by hand. It's worked out ok except for the fact that now I don't have an airing cupboard, the dough takes ages to rise so usually takes all day from start to finish.

I googled the problem and came up with a couple of ideas. First is to put the dough into a switched off microwave  with jugs of hot water. Trouble is my microwave is not big enough for that so the other idea is to heat the oven, turn it off and leave the dough to prove over a large pan of boiling water.

That does work except I only had one large bread tin and two small so one of the tins did not fit over the pan of hot water so did not rise so well. All of my tins are old anyway so I finally bought two new large pans yesterday so that problem is solved. It still takes a while to rise the dough twice and that ties the oven up so I tried starting the bread before bed and leaving it on the breakfast bar overnight. That worked wonderfully so I am all set for the next bread making session.

I takes me a while but I get there in the end.