Everyday Systems

I've been interested in trying the bread from Great Depression Cooking. The video isn't exact about the ingredients, but the book is. It makes 6 loaves of bread. Not only do I not have six bread pans, I don't have the space to keep six loaves of bread!

I cut the recipe by 2/3 and made 2 loaves. I can't believe how good it is -- and how much money I'm going to be saving on bread! It's also not very difficult.

I have watched the video on youtube and wanted to try the bread. I just checked out the book from the library and there seems to be a huge difference in the recipe between the video and the book. It seems as though she is using a 5 lb bag of flour in the video and a 2 oz block of yeast.?? and makes 6 loaves. While the book calls for only a few cups of flour and claims to make 6 loaves. So now I am not so sure that this is a reliable recipe. Did you only use 3 cups of flour? Were you able to get 2 good sized loaves? Also her technique of adding the water to the flour a little at a time seemed to result in a very dense dough, more like clay. What was your experience? Thanks.

I have seen Clara on You Tube. Some timely advice.

becauseIcan wrote:I have watched the video on youtube and wanted to try the bread. I just checked out the book from the library and there seems to be a huge difference in the recipe between the video and the book. It seems as though she is using a 5 lb bag of flour in the video and a 2 oz block of yeast.?? and makes 6 loaves. While the book calls for only a few cups of flour and claims to make 6 loaves. So now I am not so sure that this is a reliable recipe. Did you only use 3 cups of flour? Were you able to get 2 good sized loaves? Also her technique of adding the water to the flour a little at a time seemed to result in a very dense dough, more like clay. What was your experience? Thanks.

The recipe in the book uses 9 cups of flour. I reduced it to 3 and add a little as necessary when kneading (which her recipe doesn't). I use about 1¼ cups water and get 2 loaves of bread. The dough isn't clay-like, it's definitely softer than that.

The loaves aren't as tall as "normal." They don't reach the top of the bread pan after rising. One thing I've noticed is that many bread recipes use the same ingredients (3 cups flour, etc) and get 1 loaf of bread. I'm thinking that either this is similar to how her mother made bread in Italy or making 2 loaves out of the ingredients typically used for 1 tricked one into believing you had more than you did during the Depression. It's worked for me. I used to eat two slices of regular bread at breakfast and lunch and now I eat two of these slices and I'm satisfied with them.