Bread making ingredients in bulk / Bread making kits I'm working on

[californiapatriot]

I'm making up some bread making "kits" for people at church who are interested. I'm teaching a bread making class in two weeks and I wanted to not only teach them how to make bread and what to use, but also have correctly proportioned amounts of ingredients in order to make a certain number of loaves. I chose 96 loaves and my target which is 8 dozen 1 lb loaves of the recipe that I use. The following is the recipe that I use including a series of notes. It may help you in forming your long term storage plan. I find a lot of people stock up on the wheat/corn/beans etc, but have very little in the way of baking supplies. I want to do another one for corn bread, and other types of corn related recipes, but that's for another day. These kits are not for sale but you could probably put one together yourself. I'm only breaking even. Just a service really to get others interested in prepping. The day is coming quickly.




Whole Wheat Honey Bread
Ingredients

[crossbow]

I also stored many pounds of Diastatic Malt Powder along with the Vital Gluton

[MSneuropil]

why work so hard?

CaliforniaPatriot....you sure have more energy than I do...LOL. What I didn't quite get from your plan of making up these "kits" is are you planning these "kits" for LTS??

Take this for what it is worth...which is about 2 cents....but I personally would not make up a kit or kits for 96 loaves of bread. For teaching purposes...I *might* go to the trouble...but I would not make up a kit with yeast, milk, fat etc for more than a month of baking, assuming your storing your kits in foodsavers, jars, or mylar. Too much work and expense and I prefer my bread to cost pennies. I used to make up kits for cornbread and yeast bread and biscuits 30 years back...but now I only make kits for quick breads...never yeast bread. I prefer to make large batchof dough once...then freeze raw dough in loaf form. Much less work and clean up.

I worked as a baker for a large school district in the 70's. So I baked bread every day. I only eat home baked bread in my family...so I have 40+ years experience feeding my family bread. I have studied all the different ways of baking bread, and probably read most of the books. (I collect cookbooks).

BUT when I teach the young people at my sons church (he is a youth minister) how to bake bread...I start off with the simplest way of all that does not require any mixer or lots of kneading. My favorite wedding gift for a young couple is a dough bucket, a dough wisk, 1 lb of yeast, and the book Artisan Bread in Five. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcG4PpG1LcQ

I simply put amt of flour I want...salt, tiny amt of yeast, water and a little melted shortening and bring it together to a shaggy mass. Then I cover it and leave it to sit (autolyse) 12-18 hours. In that amt of time...gluten will have formed without any kneading. Then I shape loafs...let raise 2-3 hours and plop it into a heated dutch oven or place on a oven stone or a cookie sheet. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2782/...852ed7ef_s.jpg



I highly recommend the Artisan Bread in Five book for new bakers (although they recommend traditional amts of yeast and I prefer tiny amt of yeast) learning how to make basic bread with refrigerated (high hydration dough). Look it up on YouTube...watch a video.

[Grantmeliberty]

When I bake bread I grind the flour for the bread I am making while I go. I started baking bread in 1972 from the recipe in the Tassajara Bread book, utilizing the sponge method. I would grind enough flour to make the sponge, and for the 45 minutes I let the sponge rise, I would grind the rest of the flour I needed. That sponge method of letting the yeast multiply has served me well, never had a failure to rise.

[brokedownbiker]

When I bake bread I grind the flour for the bread I am making while I go. I started baking bread in 1972 from the recipe in the Tassajara Bread book, utilizing the sponge method. I would grind enough flour to make the sponge, and for the 45 minutes I let the sponge rise, I would grind the rest of the flour I needed. That sponge method of letting the yeast multiply has served me well, never had a failure to rise.

I've always let the flour age for 30 days so it gets a chance to oxidize before using it for baking. Oxidizing helps strengthen the gluten forming proteins. I picked that up from a neighbor lady that ran her own bakery fro 40 years, when I have used fresh, un-aged flour it always turns out denser and heavier.