Bake up Winter Warmth with Homemade Herbal Breads
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December/January 2006
By Susan Belsinger
Think about using your favorite herbs the next time you make biscuits or muffins, or get ready to use your bread machine. The combinations and variations are infinite and using herbs to flavor your breads, whether they are leavened with yeast, sourdough, baking powder or baking soda, will be a never-ending taste experience. According to the old saying, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” To which I say, “Add some herbs!”
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While handmade bread is great, for those who prefer to use a bread machine, converting recipes is fairly simple. In general, most handmade bread recipes are designed to make two loaves of bread, while most bread machines are designed to produce one loaf, so you can simply halve all the ingredients to use your bread machine. However, you do not want to halve the amount of yeast used. Usually, you can stick to the amount of yeast your normal bread machine recipes call for.
In some cases, when the recipe you are using does not make roughly two times the amount you plan to make in your bread machine, you must do a sort of estimation and multiplication game. For example, take the total amount of flour (make sure to include all flour amounts together, if more than one type of flour is called for) required by your usual bread machine recipe. Then figure out by what number you must multiply the flour requirement in your handmade bread recipe in order to equal the amount you would normally use in your bread machine. For example, if your handmade recipe calls for 2 cups of flour, and your bread machine recipes normally call for 11⁄2 cups, you would have to multiply the 2 from the original recipe by .75 in order to get the 11⁄2 cups needed for your bread machine. You then can multiply each ingredient amount by the same number — in this case, .75 — to yield the appropriate amounts to use in your bread machine. The one tricky element here can be eggs, since you can’t very well include 11⁄3 eggs. Simply round off to the nearest number. Sometimes making the proper adjustments takes a little trial and error, but converting recipes in general should be fairly simple, so long as you are pretty familiar with your bread machine and its needs.