Matt McIrvin's Mechanical Oatmeal Bread

[mmcirvin]

I am ready to unleash on the world my one great recipe! Scoffing Luddite scoffers who scoff at bread machines will scoff, but I do not care! You can probably adapt this into a handmade recipe that you can make with your buggy whips and your butter churns; knock yourself out whilst I ascend to transhuman extropian technobreadfulness.

(All quantities are for a two-pound loaf in a Welbilt bread machine. These things scale nonlinearly and I haven't done the requisite experiments for a one-pounder, so if you have one of the little machines you're on your own.)

• 1 cup + 1-2 tbsp water
• 1/2 cup milk (I use skim; can substitute water if it comes to that)
• 2 tbsp oil of your choice (I just use canola; olive oil is good for some breads but the taste sort of conflicts with the direction I'm going here)
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• dash cinnamon (optional)
• dash nutmeg (optional)
• a few arbitrary squirts of honey (optional, really good though)
• 1/2 cup old-fashioned oats, or 1/4 cup quick oats
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• 2 cups bread flour (if you're a hardcore hippie you can make it all whole-wheat, but you'll probably have to increase the water a bit)
• 2 tsp bread-machine yeast, or 1 tbsp active dry yeast

Load the bread machine in the usual manner; set it on the whole-wheat cycle if available and let 'er rip. The dough is pretty dense and sticky. If you get the chance, you might want to eyeball it some time into the kneading cycle, spatula the crud off the sides of the pan and sprinkle some more water on there if it looks too dry.

Makes two pounds of awesomeness that will make your spouse love you more. It is excellent with peanut butter, and as toast.

The usual rules of machine breadmaking apply: if you get a squat loaf of Terry Pratchett dwarf bread that can be used as a weapon, use more water next time; if it over-rises and collapses on top, use less. This recipe is actually hard to hit on the nose. When I make it, it usually gets some sort of asymmetric crater on top, which doesn't bug me; I just consider it to be Homespun Charm.

I know it is forbidden by Lawgiver to do recipes involving milk on the delay timer, but I do it anyway and have not died yet.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I should add that this recipe is actually a distant descendant of a recipe that came with the machine, for a bread made with bran cereal. However, the recipes have the crucial difference that that one blows whereas this one rules.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

I am going to show this to my housemate, who owns and uses a bread machine, because I too want my home to be full of transhuman extropian technobreadfulness.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, you can probably decrease the amount of oil considerably if you want.

Bread-machine instructions always warn you in dire terms to follow listed quantities exactly, but one thing you learn quickly is which ingredients are very sensitive to small quantity variations (flour, total water-based liquids, yeast, probably salt [which is the brake on the yeast]) and which ones aren't (sugars [for which you just need to have enough], seasonings, oils).

[jecook]

I'm showing this to Mother. I think we might be firing up our bread machine now that it's cold enough again.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Aww, man, I don't want to have to make bread with a foot-treadle spinning wheel! Why can't I have a bradbury-future bread device?

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Mmm, looks tasty, though I insist you had "fresh-grated" to the nutmeg-- once I found out how easy it was to get nutmeg, and how very good it is fresh, and not least the neat little patterns the grated nut shows you, well, nutmeg should only be fresh. Plus it's shelflife is just about eternal.

I started pricing bread machines a while ago after visiting my sister who has one. Some really great ones at around $70, even better than the ones that hit or break $100. Fresh bread owns, and if you want to get clever with the breadmaking, most machines will make you dough and you do the rest. (That means homemade pizza, in case I was unclear.)

Also, said sister called yesterday to inform me that she has a bun in the oven, though she wasn't so elliptical about it. So, yay!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You and me both; my sister's sprog is due in December (and you guys already know about my brother-in-law adopting an exceedingly adorable daughter).

I actually have no idea how much our bread machine cost; it was a wedding gift way back in 2000, which stayed on the shelf for more than two years before I got around to trying it. I think they're cheaper and/or fancier now. They ought to be; a bread machine is really nothing but a little electric oven with a rotor in the bottom, and a microcontroller to run it all. I was thinking a while back that, had the market incentive existed, you could almost make a crude but usable one with late-19th-century technology, the biggest stumbling block being the lack of modern nonstick materials.