Category: Everyday Life

My zeal still hasn’t cooled?

Since this year’s Golden Week, I have baked bread every couple of days.
It’s mostly for breakfast, so my repertoire is not so large – just bagels, table rolls, Heidi bread, and the like – and somehow they’ve come to look like bread. I get better results if I stick with it. I could even leave some rolls and frozen bagels for Chris when I was in the hospital!

I don’t work outside the house, and my baking time became shorter compared to the first time, but I still have only a small microwave oven. My baking time always takes a couple of hours. So, for today’s lunch, I tried to bake bread following Murakami Sachiko’s microwave oven recipe.

First of all, I weighed out 100 grams of enriched flour for six ‘petit bread’. This is almost a third of the usual quantity, but it was my first try, so that was all right for our lunch. It said I didn’t need to knead at all, which made me feel anxious, but I carefully tried not to knead the dough. Mix a bit more sugar and yeast than usual into the flour, and stimulate rising with the microwave on a low wattage. It took fifteen minutes rising time (twice) and the usual baking time using the oven function. I didn’t need to do some parts (like the second rising) twice, because the quantity was small, so it was done in about one hour!

Hmm. Amazingly, it became like bread. And they are indeed ‘petit bread’! (Did I succeed in getting the bread to rise properly? It was 100 grams, so it seems this might be the size they’re supposed to be.)

– YS, 22 June 2007

22 June 2007