Homemade Bread and Butter

Today was one of my favourite teaching days. The time when we celebrate Thanksgiving together is a wonderful time to talk about what we are thankful for, to create bread, butter and vegetable soup from scratch and to share our good fortune with teachers and staff.

The students always love the taste of this homemade bread. Of course it tastes even better with homemade butter.

I have managed to find a way to bake bread without an oven. This is a necessity in a classroom where you do not have easy access to a stove. One year when I baked bread in a school, I set off the fire alarm and the whole school was evacuated! You see I didn't realize at that time that the ovens in staff rooms may not have been cleaned regularly...

This is a Welsh bread recipe that is designed to be baked in a frying pan on an open fire. I use an electric frying pan in school and a regular frying pan on an electric stove when baking this at home. I have adapted the recipe to use the "quick-rise" style of yeast, which reduces the usual two rising times to just one and replaced lard with vegetable oil.

Welsh "Planc" Bread (from The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones - 1982)

3/4 cup recently boiled water
3/4 cup milk (not skim)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 packages "quick-rise" style yeast
2 teaspoons salt
3 1/2 to 4 cups all purpose flour

* In a large bowl put the water, milk, oil and salt and mix together. Add one cup of flour and stir. Add both packages of yeast and mix in. Stir in 2 1/2 cups of flour - at this point you will have to start mixing with your hands. Keep adding in flour and kneading with your hands until the dough pulls together into a ball and is dry to the touch - about 5-8 minutes. Put a clean tea towel over the top of the bowl and let rise, in a warm place, for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Punch down the dough and put on a lightly greased frying pan (no heat) and let rise for about 20 minutes. Put the heat on med-low and make a "tent" of foil. Leave the bread to bake for 15-20 minutes and check the bottom of the bread. If there is a nice brown crust, turn it over, replace the foil "tent" and bake an additional 20 minutes. Remove the bread to a cooling rack. Cut into slices and serve with butter. This bread also makes excellent toast.

Homemade Butter in a Jar

500 ml whipping cream (regular is good but organic is really good)
1 tsp salt
1 glass jar (I use a clean empty jar of "Classico" spaghetti sauce)

*Pour the salt and cream into the jar. Shake the jar vigorously for 15-20 minutes. The cream will get thicker and thicker and all of a sudden - KERPLONK- the butterfat separates from the whey and you have a large lump of butter in the jar. Pour off the whey and spoon out the butter into a dish. You may have to "squeeze" the fresh butter with the back of a spoon to release the remaining liquid.