Grease! or butter...whatever

Yeast! 

You want your bread to be so soft and light

You got a growin' thing, you gotta feed it right
There ain't no danger it can rise too far
So add some sugar now, just a pinch from the jar

Yeast is the word

Learning to bake can be a royal pain
When your bread don't rise, It's just a crying shame
The top is burning, a disaster so real
So take it out right now, you just ruined your meal

Yeast is the word

(is the word that you heard)
It's alive, can't mistreat it
Yeast needs the time, a warm place, and devotion
Yeast is the microbe we're eating

Time to make some bread! And I’ve got a carton of buttermilk in the fridge that’s about to go bad, so…

Buttermilk Bread

6 cups buttermilk

1 cake dry yeast

½ c lukewarm water

Flour

1 ½ T salt

2 T sugar

2 T butter

Heat buttermilk, stirring constantly until scalded.(Scalding breaks up the proteins in the milk, that’s why you see it so frequently as a step in bread recipes; it’s all about the texture.) Remove from fire and let cool. Add yeast which has been softened in the water. Add sufficient flour to make a medium batter. Beat until smooth. Cover and set in a warm place and allow to stand overnight. (This creates a fermented batter, with a greater depth of yeasty flavor, called a ‘sponge’. I love that term and that’s what it looks like.)

Add sugar, salt, butter, and enough flour to make a dough just stiff enough to knead. Turn onto lightly floured board and knead until smooth and elastic. Allow to rise until double in bulk and work down. Let rise again until double in bulk. Form into loaves. Place in well-oiled pans. Cover and let rise until double in bulk. Bake in hot oven, 450°, about 45 minutes.

From Mrs. W.H. Juedeman, Bristow, OK, printed in The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, 1936.

My kitchen is not very warm so this process took most of the day. That’s fine; it gives more time for the flavor to develop. Here’s the end product, a soft dense texture with a hint of sourness from the buttermilk. I would absolutely make it again. It’s very similar to my mom’s famous dinner rolls.

A bowl of homemade tomato soup is perfect with the bread, slathered with Laughing Cow blue cheese spread. The soup is my last hurrah to the tomatoes of summer. Never any recipe there, just whatever is at hand to add to the tomatoes, in this case: zucchini, carrots, roasted Anaheim chilis, a little chicken stock, and tons of garlic. My daughter didn’t want the soup, or the Laughing Cow, but she did eat the bread…smothered in ketchup. Which proves the old adage: you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him eat the stinky cheese.