h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

....and for really stupendously excellent bread, bake it in a cast-iron wood-fed oven

Alas for me, I do not currently have a wood stove handy, though I did in my previous house. Perhaps we will some day install one here. In the meantime, if there's anyone else in the same predicament, you can bake a passable Irish Soda Bread in a covered cast-iron skillet in a conventional oven.

Well written yarn ffMike

Some people in NZ are installing cast-iron, wood-fed stoves in brand-new houses - they also have microwave ovens and gas hobs.

As well as baking great bread they heat the house and can be connected to the water system to heat the household's water. My ex-father-in-law even converted one into a still and made his own whisky.

Hmmmm, maybe I should write an article on them. This forum will be able to get back to concentrating on bread.

Sounds like there's more than one article in there actually: wood stoves, and stills. And what the devil is a "hob"...it's that common language problem again.

Hob originally meant a shelf beside an open fire, for keeping kettles etc, hot.

In NZ English the meaning has expanded to include the metal grids above the gas jets found on the top of a gas stove - or in the sense I have used it, sans stove/oven. The gas jets, hobs, can be incorporated into a kitchen's work bench/area where they are space efficient and convenient when boiling/blanching vegetables or using a frying pan, wok, etc.

You can connect them to the town gas supply or run them from a LPG gas bottle.

A lot of NZ outdoor BBQs work on similar principles. Efficient, excellent heat control and easy to clean.

Restaurants use them as well, gas being a far more efficient cooking medium than electricity.

Ah, a word that has vanished completely from American English. We just use the word "burner" to describe the place where you put a pot on the stove...whether it be natural gas, propane, or even electric.

A brief mention of Irish soda bread and I'm back at my granny's house in Co. Cork, Ireland savouring the aroma of fresh brown soda bread on the breakfast table. From the rest of this thread I gather you are an American who recognises real bread when he tastes it. Perhaps you can explain why all American supermarket so-called bread is apparently so unpalatably sweet it is completely useless for breakfast bacon butties. (According to my sister that is - who currently lives in Seattle and is pining for good, tasty, crusty bread like we get so easily here in the UK)

I wish I knew why American supermarket bread was so dismal. I think it was back around the 1950s that it all got puffed and sweetened to the point where it's not worth buying. I'm sure television has something to do with it. Probably atmospheric nuclear testing did as well.

There are some decent little bakeries in Seattle, so hopefully your sister can find something decent if she ventures out of the supermarkets. Within the supermarkets, Safeway's Select brand does some reasonably tasty things (though I don't know whether they'd still be tasty to Irish tastes, if that makes sense). Not knowing for sure what a "breakfast bacon buttie" is I'm not well equipped to make more specific suggestions.

Ah, that language barrier again. A butty is a sandwich and a bacon butty is a delightful concoction of thick juicy bacon rashers (also reputedly impossible to find in Seattle), tomato ketchup and tasty bread that makes a perfect start to a busy morning.

Mmm bacon butty...
moving along,
Try breadmakers, they make really nice bread, and are readily availible in NZ, they good!

ffmike, in your entry you refered to the Israelite "manna". So you mean matza? Matza is yeastless bread baked by the Israelites who fled from the Egyptians. Do you call it Manna over there?

Ah, no, I don't think I mean matzoh (the spelling I'm familiar with). Manna comes from Exodus 16, the food which God sends to sustain the Israelites while they wander in the wilderness. The matzoh actually commemorates an earlier stage in Israelite history, just after they left Egypt (before the wanderings). There's a bit in the Passover seder that explains this:

This matzoh, why do we eat it?
Because the dough had not yet risen when the King of all Kings, the Holy One Blessed be He, revealed himself to our parents in Egypt, and redeemed them. As it is said: "And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for themselves any victual." (Exodus 12:39)

So that's yet one more biblical bread reference.

The only problem with breadmakers is the bread is just sooo good, we get through a loaf at one sitting! (There are four of us, by the way)

I have to limit my baking to 2 or three times a week to stop us turning into loaves!

I've got some brilliant recipes for bread machine bread if anyone is interested.

Yes, pleeeaaaassse

How do youget the bread out of the pan? When the machine is new it's
easy but after a while the bread sticks so how do you do it?

Hmm, in my pan the bread never sticked.
But I always had to shake the pan several times.

Thanks for reply. What make of machine have you got & how long have you had it?

It was a cheap ALDI-machine I had for about 4 years.

Well I am about to start a baking course at my local college and hope there after to open a bakery somewhere in America