Cooking Tuesday - English Mufffin Bread

English Muffin Bread has only five ingredients, just five.  That is something that I love.  I also put all the ingredients together.  You don't have to wait five minutes for the yeast to bubble up.  Nor do you have to wait for the bread to rise, in fact, you'd better not. 

5 1/2 cups of warm water, 6 tablespoons of yeast, 1/2 c sugar, 2 tablespoons of salt and 11 cups of flour.  So put that all together in the bowl and start stirring.  Try to get it mixed up as much as possible. It may be wise to stir half the flour in, and then add the rest.  But it works fine like this too.

You probably want your bread pans greased.  I have a baster that I use and just "paint" margarine on the pan.  The kids love this job.  I don't know that it's cheaper, but it's one less thing on my list of groceries.

The bread looks like this when finished. Sticky and gooey.  The hardest part is getting it into the pan.  But resist the urge to add more flour.  It will lose some of it's characteristic moistness, and become more like regular bread, which is not bad, just not the kind of bread we're going for.

Resist the urge to try to shape the loaves into a prettier loaf.  It will only succeed in getting your hands more sticky.  You can actually drop some of the scraps into the pan on top of the dough in there and it will mold itself to the loaf and look like you actually did shape it.  So resist that temptation and save yourself the frustration.  Plus you'll get more dough stuck to your fingers and your loaves will be smaller. 

Then bake at 350 degrees for 35 minutes.  At that time "paint" it with butter on top.  Put it back in the oven for 10 more minutes.  Sometimes I skip this step for the sake of less margarine on my waistline, but it makes for a yummy crust.

Finally take it out of the oven and let it cool on racks.

The best way to eat this bread is toasted.  And I just received recognition for being the "Best Garlic Bread-maker" ever....from Tractorman.  In all his five years it's the best he's ever tasted.  I would have to say I think it's the only stuff he remembers tasting, but we'll just forget that part.

Making the most of today,
Steph