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How Far Have We Fallen? The Food Edition.
Have we truly lost the art of critical thinking? Do we just blindly believe what we are told? Even when it is a blatant lie?
Today’s example:
Note the claim of No-Knead Bread Mix. I bought a box of this mix last year at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, thinking I might need a loaf of bread sometime. I made it last week, two weeks after the expiration date on the enclosed yeast. It turned out okay, but the instructions were a little confusing. After mixing the yeast, water, and flour I was supposed to form a ball of the dough in the bowl, then flatten and fold ten to twenty times. Guess what folks? That’s called kneading. I have made enough bread from scratch to recognize the process. And it would have been a lot easier if I had turned it out onto a flour-covered board rather than trying to flatten and fold dough in the bowl. Does Fleishmann’s just assume that anyone who buys a no-knead bread mix doesn’t know what kneading is in the first place? And if we just call it flatten and fold, no one will ever know?
This is how they get you. Even though I was able to say, ‘wait a minute, this is kneading’ would everyone have that same reaction? Are first-time bread makers really that afraid of kneading? Would sometimes bread bakers start to question what kneading really is? After all the box says NO KNEAD. Fleischmann’s wouldn’t lie. Would they question other supposed knowledge? After all, if they cannot identify kneading while kneading, what else have they been wrong about? Or would they proudly claim they made a no-knead bread, denying reality?
Don’t get me started on ‘sugar-free’ protein bars that are full of sugar alcohol. How dumb do they think we are? Or are we, as a society, really that dumb?
Published in General
I will definitely have to try this.
About 50 or so years ago Milano’s Bakery in Joliet Il used to make a potato bread that was the size and lightness of an angel food cake. We would pick up bread on Sunday mornings on the way out of town for our weekly picnic on the Kankakee River (yes, we religiously went on a picnic every Sunday in the summer – after 6:00 am Mass). Fresh hamburger buns, and a loaf of potato bread mainly for me because if allowed I would eat the whole thing. I’ve never tasted anything like it again.
1. Use bread flour
2. Add 1 cup mashed potatoes to your regular recipe
3. Use the water you boiled the taters in as part of the liquid
4. Don’t add too much flour
Voila! Light as a feather buns
While you may consider this a recipe, for me it seems to be missing five or six other steps in there. I haven’t made bread from scratch in decades. But I am looking for something like this. I may have to give it a try. I would say thanks, but we shall see if I can manage this…I’m not much of an experimental cook or baker.
Why the desire for no kneading? Is kneading that hard? I haven’t made bread but I’ve made pizza dough. I never found it a big deal.
Use any basic white bread o r roll recipe. Just make changes as above. One cup potatoes for any size will do.
Bread has to be kneaded much longer than pizza dough.
I have one. I love it. It’s how I make most of my breads. This pat-and-fold was new for me this winter. I’ve trying to achieve a crispy crust with soft, chewy, filled-with-pockets bread for years. This new method is working.
But I do mix almost of my breads using the dough hook on my mixer. I can’t image life without it. :-)
I have used Idaho potato flakes too.
Also sweet potatoes added to bread dough makes beautiful dinner rolls. :-)
Milano Bakery is still there. Still here, in fact. I looked for potato bread, but didn’t see any. They still make their potica, though. And now I’m hungry.
The problem for me isn’t the kneading, it’s the waiting for the timing of and watching for the height of each of two rises, then a punch down and a third abbreviated rise. With no-knead dough, you just mix the ingredients one day and then knead it a half dozen times the next, shape it, and let it rise for a brief third time, and then bake it. (This is a modified no-knead.)
We used to have a bread maker. We haven’t used it in years. It’s down in the basement. This discussion has inspired me to bring it back up and see if it works. Maybe this weekend.
Just another thought on this. My 87 year old mother still makes her own bread and she kneads it and I bet she couldn’t conceptualize not kneading it. How far have we fallen – to coordinate with the title of the OP – when much younger folk try to get out of the hard work?
*As he quietly goes down to the basement to get the automatic bread machine* ;)
Trying to get out of hard work is the basis of advancement of civilization.
The need to knead, ay?
If you consider kneading hard work. Removing all physical activity isn’t necessarily good.