Last updated
05 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life 
Home Made Food
What can warm the very corners of your soul more than real home made food. You sometimes
see terms like home cooked outside pubs. Of course this means they cooked it but
didn’t actually make it. Home made food is made from start to finish in the home.
Cooking like it used to be. If you can grow the ingredients yourself then you really
have the best of the best. No commercial food product can compete.
Lets flip that thought around and now look at the other end, fast foods and ready meals. The problem here is that you have no say in the ingredients, how it is made, its seasoning or its nutritional benefits. Created on an industrial scale with highly processed foodstuffs.
Sold on the basis of being convenient, the cheap ingredients are reducing nutritional benefits. Convenience foods, cars, TV and computers are all helping to make people less active and contributing to obesity levels and poor health.
So why do we think that home made food is better? You should think of it as the balance between gaining energy from eating food and the energy needed to get that food. You could go back to ancient history and use the hunter gathers of the stone age. They had to hunt by chasing or setting traps. Perhaps walking miles. Then the prey had to be butchered and cooked all before they could consume any energy. If you make and cook your own food, it uses more energy than if you buy a ready meal from the supermarket. If you grow your own veg then the digging, raking, weeding and harvesting all need energy to complete. The cook will have to prepare, wash, chop, make pastry etc., more energy required.
Working in an office, driving about in a car, buying ready meals and eating them in front of the telly is the exact opposite of this. You can see the remarkable difference in energy needed for the two lifestyles. Consumption of energy tends to be the same, but the expenditure is less in the latter example. This has promoted the rise of the gym and the huge diet industry.
Want a better way? Then grow your own veg, make and cook your own food. You will be fitter, healthier and have less time to sit in front of the TV and you will discover what real food tastes like again!
One of those great smells, the aroma of a freshly baked loaf of bread. But why bake
it when you can buy it cheaply from the supermarket? Well, you can buy cheap bread
from the supermarket, but in our opinion it is made for a price, so ingredients,
size and quality are all trimmed to get it at the right price. If you are on a tight
budget it can be tempting, but the old saying “you get what you pay for” holds true
as always.
Home made bread does take a little time, but once you have the routine it can be done without too much effort. Because the process is broken into separate stages, it can be fitted in with other jobs.
It is tempting to use a bread maker, but there really is no need. The ingredients
are simple, flour, yeast, sugar, oil or butter and some salt. Pretty basic stuff.
Apart from the yeast, available in most kitchen cupboards. This is the recipe we
use for a basic white loaf:-
The bread can be made from normal flour but we think it is better made with strong flour. A bag of strong white flour costs less than £1 and you can get a couple of loaves out of it. Even allowing for fuel price rises we still think you can make a loaf for around a pound. Then feel the weight of it, its smell and then its taste and you will know just what’s so good about it. Commercial bread has moved so far away from real bread that it now just a shadow of it’s former self and in our opinion, not worth eating.
With a little effort, bit of time and the desire to make something better, you can do it. Have a go. Taste the difference and dump that commercial cotton wool bread. Have some say in what you eat.
How we make bread
We don’t make bread any differently to anyone else, but there are many variations
in ingredients and methods, all successful in their own right. However the time
it can take is important to us, and we now make bread in an evening, the quickest
time being from start to finish of 2 hours. This depends on room temperature and
pressure etc. The average is probably 3 hours. Of course that's not 3 hours of
constant work. The process involves periods of bread rising etc which allows you
do watch your favourite TV programme or do something more useful in between.
So here’s how we do it.
We mix the dried yeast powder with about ¾ pint (0.35 litre) warm water and sugar.
This gets the yeast off to a great start. It will start to froth, bubble and increase
in volume. Like this:-
This takes about 15-
While the yeast is getting going, you can prepare your work area and other ingredients. Get a bowl and put in the flour. Add the salt and oil. Then the yeast mixture.
Mix it all up. Tip it out on a floured work surface. This is the messy bit. It becomes very tacky and sticky. To get a dough suitable for making into bread, you have to work it by stretching, pulling, twisting and any other means of manipulating you can think of.
It will be really sticky to begin with so you must sprinkle flour on your hands, work surface and the dough mixture. As you work it more and more keep adding flour. You will start to feel the texture change to a less sticky, smoother textured dough.
So work it hard, take out all your frustrations on it for about 10 minutes until it becomes smoother, less sticky and more like putty.
When you are happy it has changed into dough, it can be moved onto the proving stage.
This is now the completed dough ready to be left to prove (rise). This is when the yeast starts to act and lifts the dough . It needs to be kept warm and covered.
This can take an hour or more, depending on the temperature.
Once complete the dough will have doubled in size. You now have to bash it again.
So you have mixed, kneaded and allowed the mixture to rise. We now have to knock the air out for a short but energetic session of stress relief. Bash, push, stretch, whichever you choose.
Place in a greased bread tin and allow to rise to twice its size again.
This 2lb loaf was cooked at Gas Mark 7 for 40 minutes (approx 200c)
Once you can make bread dough, you can apply it to others things like Pizzas.
Perhaps for less than half the price of a bought Pizza plus you have control over the contents too. How good is that!
Now let’s take a look at Brown Bread
There are some subtle differences between the types of bread and the flour they are made from.
White bread is made from white flour, all of the bran and germ removed leaving just the starch flour.
Brown bread is made from brown flour, this is white flour with the bran added back in later on.
Wholewheat is what it says, the whole grain ground up and used.
Let’s look at some economics here. At the time of writing (30/10/11) Strong White Bread Flour costs 65p for a 1.5kg bag. Strong Brown Bread flour costs about £1.30 per 1.5kg bag.
To make a white loaf you use 1kg of flour. That would cost 43p in flour. To use brown flour (ready bought) would cost 87p.
If brown flour is white flour with bran added back in then how much will it cost to buy your own bran and add it to white flour? Well here we go . . .
A bag of Jordans bran (perhaps one of the better ones) costs 75p for 375g. You use just under 100g per loaf which means you will get four loaves from one bag. That means each loaf would cost 19p in bran.
Remember we calculated that white flour costs 43p per loaf. Add the 19p for the bran to this and you have 62p. Compare that to the cost of using brown flour at 87p and you can see we have saved 25p on a single loaf. That will cover the cost of cooking it!
So making your own “brown flour” is cheaper than buying it ready made. You then have control over how much bran goes in, plus we think bought bran is better quality than what the bakeries use.
Does it turn out well? I think you know the answer to that!
So now you can make your own bread, what better than making some home made butter and jam. Then the perfect breakfast . . .
