Make some bread!

Tried this Mother Earth News recipe - very similar to the Polydough concept. Super easy and super delish!  And I now have enough dough in the fridge to make fresh bread for at least a week.

https://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/five-minutes-a-day-for-fresh-baked-bread-zmaz08djzgoe

Hey bread makers!  How do you recommend storing the bread once made?  Trying to stay away from plastic if possible - do you just leave it out in the air before cutting?  How about after cutting?  Paper bag?

I made some cloth bags similar to this:



And I love this for slicing the bread:



The easiest for me is to slice the bread one slice at a time then stand it up on my cutting board with the cut side down:

Artie Scott wrote:Hey bread makers!  How do you recommend storing the bread once made?  Trying to stay away from plastic if possible - do you just leave it out in the air before cutting?  How about after cutting?  Paper bag?

I have a big ceramic pot with a lid that is intended as bread storage (not sure if it came with the house or I took it from my parents' house).
If I know that we will not eat the bread in one or two days max, I cut it up and freeze half of the loaf. As I make sourdough bread and add rye and often potato to the dough it keeps fresh longer time.

I also freeze our bread. My husband eats it, not me, and if he starts to slow his pace I freeze and take out half a loaf at a time (I generally make 2+ loaves at once). I save paper bags from when we do occasionally buy bread and like to store it in them while it is out on the counter.

Anne Miller wrote:I made some cloth bags similar to this:

At 80 yrs I'm just learning how to bake a loaf of bread. My first loaf was great! My second loaf came out with a hard crust and much softer middle. I know that I can soften the crust with a brush on of melted butter, but what about the middle?

I'm using a simple recipe where the dough is mixed by kneading, left to rest covered, kneaded again and set into bread pan to rest again in oven, then oven is turned ON and timer set.

SO, would the hard crust, soft middle be due to kneading it too much or not enough? I know that I can soften the crust with a brush on of melted butter.

I started dough yesterday having completely forgotten about todays date (dec. 21) and upon baking my bread today I decided it was solstice bread. It's the same bread I made in my A Load for Lammas thread, but I'm sharing this here because it's not Lammas, it's the solstice! I thought about sharing this in the Dutch oven bread thread since it's baked inside a cast iron dutch oven, but I used my indoor kitchen oven instead of an outdoor fire, which the thread is focused on, so I chose to post here instead.

The recipe is the Overnight White Bread from the book Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish, p.89.

The ingredients for one loaf are:

500g all purpose flour
390g warm water
11g unrefined sea salt
1/8tsp instant yeast