Last Okara Ploaf!

It was so nice to be sat at work and know that my little oven womb was working away making me a beautiful loaf, and the thought of coming home to that fantastic smell of baking bread. YUM.

Well, this was the last time that I will use okara in bread. I have tried, and tried, and tried. I have made about 6 loaves of okara ploafs. I will make no more ploafs, or at least of the okara variety.

For whatever reason, substituting some of the flour for okara isn't working. Perhaps it's because the okara isn't milled fine enough, it could be that the substitution is throwing the gluten content out. Most likely, it's because the moisture content is all wrong, to start with my okara is damp. I am far far FAR to lazy to dry it out in the oven. I'm sure that because it doesn't absorb water at the same rate of an equivalent amount of flour thats the problem.

Perhaps finer grinding would help, but oh well. Easy come easy go. I saving money by making soy to start off with, so a little wastage isn't w big deal. No wastage would be fantastic, but thats not going to happen at this point.

So there you have it. If someone tells you that you can make great bread using okara, they are most probably not telling hte truth, or they know something that I don't.

Bread Machine

This morning before I left the house I set the bread machine at it's task.

Although there is enough bread in the house, I thought that it would be nice to come home to that nice bread smell.

Whats even better is this. I am sat at my desk at work knowing full well that any minute now the bread will start baking.

Okrararara Bread

So. When you make soy milk, you are left with ground up soy beans, otherwise known as okara. Rather than put this to waste, I googled about the internet and found that it can be used for a number of things, one of caught my interest; bread. People who have far more time than I, have listed recipes where they have pounded their work surfaces with hand cared and crafted dough.

So I did this.

1. Find list of ingredients
2. Adapt it to my own successful bread machine recipe
3. Make loaf in the bread womb (otherwise know to you as a bread machine)

The general consensus was to exchange a cup of flour for a cup of okara. Not forgetting to decrease the amount of liquid that you use. No don't forget that.

In fact, when it came to press the start button, I panicked. Not only did I forget that I shoud DECREASE the amount of water, infact I did the total opposite. I was worried that all that okara just might decide to suck up all of the water that I had put in the pan, so I may just have put in two more tablespoons of water "just to be on the safe side"

WHOOPS!

As Totty takes a look into the bread machine window close to the end of baking
Me - "how is that bread looking?"
Totty - "Ermm, you might want to take a look"
Me - "Oh ok"

Not only had the top sunk, but it had really sunk. You know how a brick has an indentation on the top? Well my loaf of protein rich okara bread had that. A big whopping indent on the top, big enough for a medium sized kitten to sleep in.

Even worse, the kitten size indent wasn't quite cooked! So I had to turn on my house womb(oven to the rest of the world) and let the loaf finish off.

Apart from the indent, the loaf didn't look too bad, yes I did forget about it while in the oven. Unlike other bread, it did brown very quickly. Perhaps a tad too brown.

Now this morning, when Totty had left, I sliced myself a couple of slabs to see if the verdict was as bad as the diagnosis.

Remember when I should have reduced the amount of water? Remember that? Well I really should have, this loaf is just too moist. The flavour isn't fantastic, it could use something in the mix. The okara is rather bland, so I should have expected this.

Overall, this is a "not bad" failure. I would really prefer not call this a loaf. Rather a ploaf, because this ploaf is an insult to a good looking loaf, with it's high crusty crust, and it's dense flavoursome innards.

**Bread Recipe Update**

I have made a bit of a tweak to the bread recipe that I have been using. The quantities previously have been a little unreliable. It's surprising how small tweeks can make such a big difference, and that's why accuracy in measuring is so important.

Brown Bread Machine Bread

1 1/2 cups water
2 tbsp + 2 tsp sugar
2 1/4 tsp salt
2 cups white bread flour
2 1/2 cups brown bread flour
1/3 cup rye or oats
1/4 cup + 2 tsp oil (I use plain olive oil sunflower)
1 tbsp + 1/2 tsp yeast

Put everything into the machine in the order listed (unless your bread machine tells you otherwise), so that the yeast is sitting on the top of the ingredients dry. Use the wholemeal cycle and choose dark crust if you have that setting.

As I said before my machine advertises itself as making a 1.5kg loaf.

Bready bread Goodness Me!

Hello, so here is the recipe that I promised you yesterday.

It’s a very modified recipe that I got from www.allrecipes.com. The instructions that came with my bread machine were rubbish, I did pay only €35 for it, so I can’t complain too loudly. I didn't mind having to look around for a good recipe.

I like the bread machine section there, because it has a very handy function that allows you to scale any recipe to fit your machine. It was a bit of trial and error and then some success, just like life.

The fluff about my machine says that it will make a loaf of 1.5kg and, at allrecipies.com I use the recipes scaled to 19 servings. Something that I will say about some of the recipes on allrecipes.com, and indeed a lot of American food sites, is that they are very heavy handed with the sugar.

That's my opinion, and you are very welcome to it.

Bread for the bread machine

INGREDIENTS
1⅓ cups water
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
¼ cup and 2 teaspoons oil, sunflower, groundnut, grapesead or olive oil.
2 cups strong white flour
2½ cups wholemeal bread flour
½ cup whole rolled oats
1 tablespoon and ½ teaspoon active dry yeast

DIRECTIONS
Place water, sugar, salt, oil, bread flour, oats and yeast into pan of bread machine.
Bake on wholemeal bread setting with dark crust selected.

As you can see from the photo, the bread is a little lop sided and sunken on one side, I am still tweaking the quantities. I will let you know of improvements as they happen.

Last night when Totty came home from work, it was sort of late, and there wasn't anything ready to go in the fridge. So we were quite naughty and went to the chip shop. So we had chipper, chip shop sandwiches with fresh bread, and a big mug of milky tea each, to wash it down with. Of course we spread real butter on our bread.

I would have taken a photo, because this is real food porn of the highest degree. I didn't because we scarfed down the lot, far too quickly to even think about sharing!