Bread Machine - an investment that's worth the dough

When bread machines first came out, people thought that they were the best thing since sliced bread. But now, it's quite common to see at least one or two at the local thrift store for only 8 to 15 bucks, depending on which shop you frequent. If you get a new one, they're anywhere between $50 to over $200, depending on brand, whether it's stainless steel or plastic, size of loaf, etc. This is the kind of thing a frugal person would want to try out by getting a used one first and then deciding if it's really going to be used on a regular basis before spending big bucks on a new one.

In my latest youtube video, I showed the whole process of baking bread, using a bread machine to mix the dough and a toaster oven to bake it. I included a short section on what the bread should look like while it's mixing in the bread machine. If it's too moist, add a little flour at a time until it looks right. If it's too dry, add small amounts of water until it starts rotating properly. This video has been featured on http://largetoasteroven.net/

The machine itself is not a complicated contraption. There's a loaf pan with a paddle that is connected to a peg in the pan, which is placed in the machine. The motor in the machine moves the paddle, which agitates and mixes the dough for set times, depending on which mode you choose. When the dough is mixed, you can either take it out to rise and bake in a regular oven or keep it in the machine, which will bake the bread in the shape of your loaf pan. Personally, I like to use the dough function, take it out and bake it in either a toaster oven or regular oven because my machine's loaf pan creates a vertical loaf, which is just a little weird and awkward to cut. The paddle also makes a hole in the bottom of the baked loaf. Furthermore, the pan is very difficult to wash if you bake the bread in the machine. It's much easier to just wash the bits of raw dough.


The basic recipe is:
1 cup water
1 Tbsp oil
1 tsp salt
1-2 Tbsp sugar/honey
3 cups flour
1-2 tsp yeast


It's important to get flour that has a high gluten content because it will help your dough rise properly. When I started using my bread machine, I made quite a few dense bricks because I was using the regular all-purpose flour from the supermarket. Then, I tried the flour from BMS Paper company and I was finally able to make a nice fluffy loaf. The Pillsbury brand flour works well too. If you want to use whole wheat flour or any other type of flour, start experimenting by replacing only 1/4 cup of the white flour with the non-white flour. Eventually, you'll get a feel for how much of the white flour you can substitute before the bread starts coming out too dense or falling while it bakes. If you can find unbleached white flour, that seems to work better than most other flours.


The main advantage of letting the dough rise and then baking it in a regular loaf pan is that you can let it rise as much as you want. The bread machine's mixing and baking cycles are timed so that the dough only has a certain amount of time to rise before the machine automatically starts baking it. However, there is such a thing as letting it rise too much (see picture below). If this happens, just knead it by folding it a few times and then let it rise again. No big deal.

This is what happens when the dough is allowed to rise too long!

As a poor student, using the bread machine to mix saves time and allows you to do your homework while the machine does all the hard work. The only time you need to get your hands dirty is when you dump the dough into the regular loaf pan. Hopefully you have a toaster oven with a timer so that you can just set it and get back to your books. Baking your own bread also allows you to control what goes into your bread. If you read some ingredient labels, you'll notice that some companies still use high fructose corn syrup, which is just a tasteless sweetener. Why use that when you can use honey or molasses? It's also fun to try adding other flours like hemp flour, coconut flour, or whole wheat flour. When it's baking, it also makes your whole house smell good.

Pizza - the cheapest meal in town

Most college students will have quite a few slices of pizza during their 4 years in the dorms or wherever they live. In one recent episode of the TV show, Nightline, pizza was shown to be in higher demand during recessions because it's such a cheap meal. So, it's no surprise that pizza is such a popular meal for poor college students. Unlike the rest of the population, there are fewer fluctuations in demand. This is why I thought that a post on pizza would be appropriate for this blog.

In my previous post on making pizza in the humble toaster oven, I didn't really get into the ingredients themselves. The point was to show you that the toaster oven can do things you might not expect were possible. This post is about the ingredients. At this point, you might be wondering why you should even consider making your own pizza? Getting a pizza delivered usually costs around $10. Depending on what you put on your pizza, you can make it at home for much less and with not much time or energy. The trick is to make a lot of dough at one time and then store it in the freezer. Defrost a portion in the fridge over night when you think you'll have pizza.

Get some Pizza Dough
Making the dough is what takes the most time. If you really don't want to make your own dough, you can usually buy the dough for very little money. Most supermarkets and Trader Joe's sell balls of dough for about $1 to $2 each. If you're willing to spend $2.50 (plus tax) for a ball of really tasty dough, try the balls of dough from Oggi Gourmet at Harvard Square. They're located in the Holyoke Center (by Au Bon Pain) and don't really advertise that they sell dough, but they do. Just ask for "a ball of dough". I try to get some every time I'm in the area. It's actually better than the stuff you get from supermarkets and worth the extra couple of bucks. It's still cheaper than ordering pizza! Most balls of dough from any place are enough for two medium to large thin crust pizzas.

For those of you who are willing to get your hands dirty and try making your own dough, a bread machine will save you a lot of time and effort. All you have to do with one of those is put the ingredients in the pan, choose the mixing function (so it mixes the dough but doesn't bake it), and start it. In about 1.5 hours, you have a ball of pizza dough! Go to any thrift store and there will probably be a bread machine selling for about $10 or less. As an added benefit, you can bake your own funny-looking bread in it too. Actually, it's better to mix the dough in the machine, take it out, put it in a baking pan, let it rise for an hour or more, and then bake it in the oven. That's just my opinion though - do whatever you have time to do.

The basic ingredients for dough are flour, sugar, yeast, salt, and water. Flour will be about $2 to $4 a bag and sugar is quite inexpensive at CVS. If you plan to make your own pizza and bread for an extended period of time, you can get 2 lb bags of yeast for less than $10 at BMS Paper Company or at haymarket in the middle-eastern store. Even though you don't need a lot of yeast for each batch, the stuff you get at the supermarket is not cheap. Try to find some friends who might want some yeast and divide that 2 lb bag. It freezes quite well. I've had the same bag in the freezer for over 2 years and it still works. Just take out a few ounces at a time and put it in a clean jar to store in the fridge.

Roll out the dough
If you sprinkle some flour on your pizza pan before rolling out the dough on it, you'll have an easier time cleaning up afterwards. Now, when I say, "rolling out," I don't really mean that you need a rolling pin to flatten it. All you really need to do is to press down on the dough on the pizza pan a little bit at a time and eventually, it will stretch out enough. If it doesn't seem to stretch out enough, let it sit for a while and then try stretching it again. When the dough gets to the edge of the pan, throw the toppings on and put it in the oven.

Throw the toppings on!
The toppings are relatively easy to prepare. Grate the cheese and chop up everything else. At haymarket, you can get a chunk of cheese (around 6 to 8 oz, depending on the type of cheese) for $3, 2 chunks for $5, or 3 for $7. If they have cheddar, muenster or mozzarella, that's going to be about 8 oz. You shouldn't need more than half a chunk for a small pizza. For sauce, buy the pasta sauce that goes on sale every now and then (usually 3 jars for $5). Go easy on the sauce though because too much sauce will make dough soggy. The thinner the dough, the lighter the toppings need to be. Otherwise, you won't be able to pick up the pizza and have it stay in one piece.

If all of these instructions are a little overwhelming, here's a video by Sousoukitchen to show you (in English and in French) how to make the dough using a food processor to mix the ingredients to get the dough together and the rest of the process step by step.

Average cost of a homemade pizza:
Let's say you make 6 pizzas with one bag of flour ($4 a bag), which comes to 67 cents a pizza. Two lbs of sugar at CVS is only $3 when it's on sale. There are 9 cups in one of those yellow Domino round containers. Let's say you use 2 Tbsp per pizza, which means it will be less than 10 cents a pizza. The yeast should also be less than 10 cents a pizza. For salt, if you seriously don't have any, go to your school cafeteria and take a couple of salt packets. Water is free. So, the dough should cost about  87 cents to make. The cheese is the most expensive part. If you use half a chunk of cheese, that's about $1.50 or less, assuming that you bought only one chunk of cheese at haymarket. The amount of sauce you use will be very little, so let's say that's about 17 cents (10% of the Ragu jar from CVS, on sale for 3 jars/$5). Tally it up and each cheese pizza costs only $2.54. Any toppings you add will be extra but probably won't add up to anywhere near $10. Now you know why Domino's makes so much money.

Save even more by using the toaster oven (to save electricity)
If you have a large toaster oven, you can bake a pretty big pizza and use less electricity that you would with your regular oven. If you have a smaller toaster oven, it's possible to make small pizzas that feed one person. Two personal pizzas can probably fit in a small toaster oven. It should take about 20-25 minutes at 400 F to fully bake the pizzas. Larger pizzas will take a few more minutes. However, each oven is different, depending on size and accuracy of temperature. Watch the cooking process closely at first to make sure you don't burn it.

The humble toaster oven (continued) - making pizza

In the last post on the humble toaster oven, I made bread. In this post, I'm going to show you how easy it is to make pizza in whatever size toaster oven you have. If you have a small toaster oven, you can make a small round pizza or medium rectangular pizza. It doesn't matter if you don't have a pizza pan because you can just make one out of some aluminum foil.

The toaster oven I used to make pizza was the GE convection toaster oven that I got from the Goodwill. The pan that I used barely fit in there so I would probably use a slightly smaller pan or a rectangular pan the next time. To make this pizza a little healthier, I used a bean and tomato sauce puree instead of a regular tomato sauce. The advantages of doing this was that I could use up my leftover red beans, get some extra protein in my pizza without adding meat, and the bean puree was less watery than tomato sauce. If you've ever made homemade pizza and ended up with a soggy crust, it was probably because you put too much tomato sauce on it. The bean tomato puree had just enough moisture in it to moisten my dried mushrooms, which were the main topping on the pizza.

Toppings:
bean tomato puree (use blender to puree cooked beans and tomato sauce)
minced garlic
dried mushrooms
grated swiss cheese
tomato sauce (for the smiley face)
olive oil (so the dough didn't stick to the pan)

Pizza about to get baked

This is what it looks like when it's done.

The dough was from Oggi Gourmet in Harvard Square. Their dough is much better than mine. The bean puree was actually very good on the pizza! Initially, I put it on there just because I was trying to put more beans in my diet and wanted to create a less watery sauce but it also adds another layer of texture to the pizza. I'd put it on pizza again just because it tastes (and feels) good. The dried mushrooms were more flavorful than fresh mushrooms and had a nice earthy flavor. However, I dried those mushrooms in a dehydrator, which means that they might not be as dry as the shitake mushrooms at the Chinese supermarkets. If you want to try adding dried mushrooms, it might be a good idea to soak them for at least 15 minutes before putting them on the pizza.

Here's a video showing the baking process:

Sponge Toffee - Part Trois

Since I've been getting so many page views on the pages about sponge toffee, I just had to try another variation and share it with my readers. This time, I decided to try out a recipe that includes butter. I also wanted to add some bitter flavors again to balance out the sweetness. I added some espresso, as in Sponge Toffee - Part Deux, but also some rum.

Here's the recipe:
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup killer bee honey
1 Tbsp butter
2 tsp rum
1/4 cup espresso
1 tsp vanilla

Heat in a saucepan (2Qt) until it reaches 300 F, stirring only enough to mix the ingredients together. Use either a silicon or wood spatula. Then, add 2 tsp sifted baking soda and stir until evenly distributed. Pour into a parchment paper-lined brownie pan and let cool for about an hour. This is what it should look like:

The good news is that this sponge toffee tastes a lot richer than the batches without butter. The bitterness is nice though. One room mate said that the bitterness adds a bit of burnt flavor to it. If you don't like this bitter/burnt flavor, break the toffee into pieces and dip into chocolate, which will mellow out the flavors. The texture was a little harder or crunchier than the previous batches without butter. It was slightly easier to control the size of pieces when breaking it, but still shattered as before. The shattering is not bad because you can pour the crumbs into the last bit of melted chocolate and drop little mounds on parchment/waxed paper to make some yummy sponge toffee crumb chocolate mounds!

However, the bad news is that the butter prevents the toffee from bubbling up as high. There were still bubbles in the toffee but it the final product was thinner than the stuff without butter. However, it might have been because the brownie pan was still too big and the toffee had too much room to spread out. Also,  the rum and espresso don't really complement each other because they're both bitter flavors. Next time, I would probably leave out the espresso or the rum because you can't really taste both at the same time.

It still tastes great, so I highly recommend this recipe either as is or without the rum or espresso. A little more honey might be good too.

Sponge toffee - Part Deux

The advantage of making your own sponge toffee is that you can create your own flavors. In this post, we will look at espresso flavored sponge toffee. The recipe is:

1/4 cup espresso

1/4 cup honey

1 cup sugar (any combination of white, brown, and/or Turbinado)

1 tsp vanilla

2 tsp baking soda

(Notice that there is no vinegar here. It really does not bring anything to the party, so leave it out.)

As with any other sponge toffee recipe, heat the first 4 ingredients in a sauce pan until 300 F, quickly mix in the baking soda, and pour it all into a greased pan or parchment paper-lined pan. If you use a silicon mat, make sure the sides of the pan are either greased or lined with parchment paper. That's it. For the results, here's a video:

In the video, I tried putting a few chocolate chips on the bottom of the pan to see what would happen. It's actually a good idea if you were going to drizzle chocolate on it anyway. The advantage is that the heat of the toffee when you pour it on top of the chocolate will melt the chocolate and make it flat. I'm not sure why that's a good thing, but if you want that kind of presentation, there you go. Fancy, eh?

Upon closer inspection, the pan was actually too big to make a difference in thickness of the toffee. For this amount of candy, use a smaller pan, perhaps a square brownie pan, so that the toffee has less room to spread out. In the batch that I showed in the video, the sides were a little higher but the middle was exactly the same height as the other slab of sponge toffee. However, the taste was definitely better in this batch because the espresso and honey contribute some nice complex flavors. Corn syrup (replaced by honey here) is cheaper but really has no flavor. The molasses from the brown sugar also adds some nice dark flavor to the toffee. If you want to make a lot of sponge toffee with honey, BMS has a great deal - 5 pounds of wildflower honey for only $13.99. That's enough honey to make sponge toffee for your friends and your neighbors' friends.

For another person's experiences and pictures of the sponge toffee-making process, see the Chocolate Apprentice. That page also has a recipe for nut croquant.

Making sponge toffee and homemade Crunchie bars

When I was growing up in Canada, one of my favourite chocolate bars was the Cadbury Crunchie bar, which is not readily available in Boston. I found some a couple of weeks ago at a candy store in Back Bay but they were $3 each! [Update: you can get a case of 24 Crunchie bars on Amazon.com for less than $30 (and free shipping) now.] As a poor student, it is not possible to enjoy Crunchie on a regular basis. So, I decided to look online to see how easy it was to make sponge toffee at home. It's actually quite easy.

The first time I tried making sponge toffee, it didn't turn out right because I didn't use a candy thermometer and didn't heat the sugar up to the appropriate temperature (300F). So, if you want to try this, go to a kitchen supply store and spend the $11 or $12 for a candy thermometer! Kitchenwitch, in Jamaica Plain, carries them and BMS Paper Company usually has them too. Kitchenwitch also has a $4 thermometer but it's just a glass thermometer and I'm a bit of a klutz. That's why I went with the $11 model, which encases the thermometer in a stainless steel frame. It would take some effort to break that. Macy's and other stores with kitchen sections have candy thermometers too. If you don't want to leave your house, Amazon has a great selection. (Click on the pictures on this page to go directly to the product on Amazon.com)

There are several recipes online, in video form (e.g. on Youtube) and print form (e.g. Cooking Channel website). The basic recipe is 1 cup sugar (brown or white), 1 cup corn syrup (or other form of liquified sugar, such as molasses, Lyle's golden syrup or honey), and 1 Tbsp baking soda. However, it can easily be altered to make different flavors, such as ginger molasses, maple, or vanilla.

In addition to the ingredients, you will need a saucepan, a candy thermometer, and a parchment paper-lined or greased pan to put the toffee. Some recipes call for vinegar but it's not necessary. The baking soda will bubble up without it. Make sure your saucepan is large enough to accommodate the extra volume when the toffee bubbles up. Also, use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture. A whisk doesn't work well because the toffee gets stuck in between the wires. I also noticed that some recipes tell you to grease the parchment paper. This is not necessary because the whole point of using parchment paper is that it is naturally non-stick!

For those of you who are curious about the science behind sponge toffee, here's an article for your enjoyment:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/24/sugar-honeycomb-cinder-toffee

Cheap but uber-awesome candy!
Even if you use honey and turbinado sugar, it should cost you less than $5 to make a pan of sponge toffee, which you can then dip into chocolate to make a bunch of homemade misshapen Crunchie bars (see pictures below). If you're really on a budget, use corn syrup (around $3-4 a bottle with enough for more than 2 batches) with some water and white sugar. For the price of a Crunchie bar, you can make a whole pan of sponge toffee. For chocolate dipping, get a bag of chocolate chips from Trader Joe's (around $3) and you're all set. A bag of chocolate chips should be enough to make at least 8 or 9 bars, making the cost of each bar about $1. The other advantage of making your own chocolate bars is that you can dip the sponge toffee in dark chocolate, which counter-balances the sweetness of the sponge toffee better than the milk chocolate in the store-bought bars. If you're too lazy to dip each piece in chocolate, pour the melted chocolate over the toffee before breaking it into pieces. This is probably one of the least expensive candies to make and it's a great gift to give at Christmas or any time.

Here is a video of me making this recipe:

In this video, I might have stirred the toffee a little too much. Stir until the baking soda is mixed in but not much more than that.

Sponge toffee from another batch - with honey and less stirring after the baking soda was added.

Sponge toffee pieces - ready to be dipped in chocolate (or stored in an airtight container)

Sponge toffee, freshly dipped in melted semi-sweet chocolate chips

Chocolate-dipped sponge toffee ready to store (or devour)!

For more variations on this recipe, please see my other posts on sponge toffee:

Sponge Toffee - Part Deux

Sponge Toffee - Part Trois (with butter)