Exploring new horizons in cooking

As of early 2010, my cooking involved only pan frying, steaming, grilling and closed-wok "currying". I tried deep frying a couple of times in an effort to make pan-fried pork shops and chili chicken -- a very popular dish in south India...especially with booze -- but only succeeded in smoking up my small North End apartment. So I don't deep fry anymore. In the past couple of months, however, I have been spending more of my cooking time baking and roasting stuff using the oven. I have been making my own bread too!

There are plenty of bread making recipes along with the ingredient list on the web. So I won't go into too much detail here. Pictured below are the steps to make simple whole wheat bread. The whole thing takes about an hour. Typically I do this Sunday morning and then use the bread up over the following week.


1. Mix bread flour with active dry yeast, honey and warm water.

2. Add salt, melted butter and, in increments, whole wheat flour. You want to add the whole wheat flour in increments until the batter easily comes off the container and yet is slightly sticky.

3. Roll the batter around in a pan containing a thin layer of melted butter until the batter has a coating of butter. At this point, the batter should be firm and come easily off the container without sticking. Cover the container using plastic wrap or foil and let sit until the batter doubles in size (not pictured).

4. Punch batter down and place in loaf pan.

5. Wait until the batter rises an inch or so above the rim of the loaf pan. Then place loaf pan in oven. Set oven to 350 degrees. Set timer to remind you in about 30 minutes.

6. After 30 minutes, turn the oven off and take the loaf pan out of the oven. Baste top of bread with a thin layer of melted butter.

7. Yum!

To store this bread, use a bread box. If you don't have a bread box, leave the bread in the loaf pan and let it cool first before covering it with aluminum foil. This way, the bread should keep well for a few days.

As a final note, I recently bought a pressure cooker. I have used it successfully to prepare pot roasts. In a future post, I will post some pictures from that piece of cooking.