Bread

Bad, bad blogger, I know! Life got in the way.

I haven't been doing much crafting lately anyway, but I need to get into gear for Christmas.



One thing I have been doing is making bread. I was lucky enough to find a breadmaker, in perfect working order, on my local Freecycle group. Only one suburb away, too!

This thing is awesome. I did make bread before, sometimes. But I had two issues: firstly, finding a big enough block of time to mix, knead, prove, knead, prove, bake, because we're in and out a lot most days. The Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day takes care of that, but the kids don't like the artisan-style bread. The second issue is that I'm a lazy kneader and the bread was never light and fluffy enough.

I was buying about 4 loaves of preservative-free bread, and a bag of rolls, each week. Plus my partner kept buying lunch because neither of us got organised enough to make sandwiches. The past couple of weeks, I've bought one loaf of bread a week, and he has taken savoury scrolls for lunch.

Savoury Scrolls

1 quantity of your favourite bread dough
pizza sauce, pesto or some other kind of sauce
grated cheese
other toppings, e.g. ham, bacon, chopped onion, mushrooms, capsicum, sundried tomatoes, pineapple.

After its first rise, roll out the dough into a large rectangle.

Spread with sauce, add other toppings and sprinkle with cheese (reserving a little cheese).

Roll up, starting from the long side. When you've rolled it into a log, pinch the edge a bit so it sticks. Cut into 2cm pieces.

Place either in a large round cake pan, or on a tray (depending on whether you want the scrolls to join up or not). Cover with a clean tea towel and leave to rise for about 30 minutes.

Sprinkle with reserved cheese, and bake in a preheated 180 deg C oven for about 15 minutes or until browned and hollow-sounding.

When cooled, they can be wrapped and frozen individually. Just pull one out each morning for lunch!

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The breadmaker does make a funny-shaped loaf, so if I have time I just do the dough in there, roll in sesame seeds and bake it in a loaf tin. But for when I don't, the time delay function is awesome, being able to wake up to freshly-baked bread!