A New Experience

Yeast. An baking ingredient that I have never used before. I have always wanted to try some good looking recipes that called for yeast, such as a loaf of bread or cinnamon rolls or even dinner rolls. However, I have never actually made any of them. I have bought those packets of yeast numerous times over the years. I kept them until they expired, then was forced to throw them out having never gotten up the courage to try my hand at it.
That finally changed yesterday.

I recently instituted Tuesdays as my baking day. It's a day I have set aside to do any large amounts of baking that I want to get done for the week. For example, a large batch of biscuits with the extras going in the freezer to be baked later, or a big batch of banana bread to snack on all week. I had figured that one of these baking days I would finally get around to using some of that yeast I have been storing in the refrigerator.

So, searching around the web and my own stash of cookbooks, I picked out a few bread recipes that sounded good. Randomly picking just one, I eagerly set about whipping up my first ever batch of bread using yeast.

Here is the result. The taste of this simple white bread was amazing! The recipe called for yeast, water, sugar, butter, milk and flour. Nothing fancy, however quite tasty.

The picture is a bit deceiving, this loaf was a squat little thing. It was baked in a 8x4 loaf pan with the top baking up at just the height of the pan. Using a glass pan created a thick dark crust all around. Since glass is all that I have in the way of loaf pans, I will either have to be content with this kind of crust or go out any buy myself a new pan.

Over all, this was a good first try. I will look forward to other baking days when I can experiment again with a different recipe.