Ross Cooks! Bread Machine Apathy Bread (With Almond Flour and Sourdough)

I got a bad case of Lockdown Brain this week which has interfered with my ability to write anything of substance. So instead, here’s a bread recipe.

I started out, as many of you did, by following the mantra that baking is an exact science, and you need to weigh everything and sift everything and get everything exactly right… And then I sort of zeroed in on things like “Sourdough is a living organism and there’s no way to know exactly how it is going to behave” and “Breadmaking predates the concept of weights and measures”. And I had a couple of experiences where I added the exact amounts specified in the recipe and ended up with a bowl of batter that never turned into dough until I doubled the flour.

So now I’m just kinda like, “Add a bunch of dry. Then add some wet until it seems the right amount of wet. Then turn the bread machine on and hope for the best.”

Here, then, is the bread I made tonight. It’s a somewhat dense, moist bread with a crust that is firm but not sourdough-crusty. It’s tasty and goes well with butter. Maybe a little too soft and moist for sandwiches unless you toast it first.

Ingredients: 

• 1 cup fed sourdough starter
• 2½ cups all purpose flour
• ½ cup minus 1 TBS almond four
• 1 TBS vital wheat gluten
• 1 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 TBS sugar
• ½ cup water
• 1½ tsp salt
• 1 egg white
• 2 TBS milk
• ½ tsp vegetable oil
• ¼ cup (½ stick) butter

Dump everything except the butter and milk into a bread machine. Then turn it on and hope for the best. In more detail, use the regular or white or medium cycle. Add the milk a splash at a time until it looks like it is actually going to form bread dough and not a pile of rubble. When there’s five minutes left in the kneading cycle, add the butter a tablespoon at a time.