April 23, 2020 - 12:37pm
How to Bake Enough for a Big Family?
I'll preface by saying we're a family of 8. Right now, the most I can fit into my Kitchenaid mixer is about 4-6 cups of flour at at a time, making 2 standard sized loaf pans. The thing is, we can easily go through that much bread every day.
Does anyone have tips/recipes to share to make 4 standard sized loaves at a time? I'm struggling to stay on top of our bread consumption!
The artisan style loaves definitely don't go far enough. I need to make a batch somewhere in the realm of 10 cups of flour.
Thanks for any advice! I've been making our bread for years but sourdough is a whole new adventure.
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Plenty of formulas (recipes) exist for hand-mix, no-knead (maybe with just a few stretch and folds), let it bulk ferment overnight (or final proof overnight in fridge). Let nature develop the gluten for you. You can still bake pan style.
My favorite K.I.S.S. style bread baker: www.youtube.com/user/artisanbreadwithstev/videos
He has recipes for baking in both pans and dutch ovens. And he uses just commercial yeast.
A popular recent formula here on TFL is: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/62486/community-bake-approachable-loaf-bread-lab has 3 spreadsheets, one for sourdough, one for dry commercial yeast, and a hybrid using both. Simple ingredients, pan-baked.
Teach those kids how to make bread without a machine (except for the oven). Might be good for when they're hungry college students, or out on their own for the first time.
True, I think I'm stuck in my mixer rut from my years of commercial yeast baking. I'll check out that channel, thanks for the tip!
When I'm aiming for more throughput I usually mix up a big pail of poolish (half flour half water by weight), since that just needs a quick mix with a spatula to be sure all the flour is wet. It can sit in the fridge until needed. I then mix up batches of dough using poolish for about half the flour in any recipe, making adjustments for the rest. Depending on the bread that may mean just ten minutes in the Kitchenaid, and idaveindy's suggestion of a high hydration dough that does not require a lot of machine time (if any) is brilliant. That way it's easy to run several successive batches through the mixer.
If you want to try whole grain big batches, the Laurels Kitchen Bread Book has a pattern for it. Scottish Sponge Bread, which starts with an overnight sponge and Athens has a clever way to fit four loaves together into a 10”x16” pan.
Easy to make one loaf a cinnamon raisin swirl, too.