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PUBLISHED: | By Hilary Erickson
Here it is, black and white. I love too many people. I was left without a way to sufficiently thank them for all that people do for our family and still stay under our Christmas budget.
And then I remembered.
I make bread. Pretty darn good bread. I might even say pretty D@&& good bread, but this is a family blog.
And so each year, I sojourn into making upwards of 20 loaves for teachers, friends, neighbors and the like. Heres my top 5 tips for making a lot of bread {making loaves for droves}:
1. Buy at least 4 pans. I can MAYBE cook 6 loaves in my oven. It’s kind of tight, and the cooking time gets off from my usual. I’d rather cook 4 at a time and just keep rotating through. I have 8 pans. I got them for 88 cents at Walmart. Anything cheap will do. I don’t wash these pans, they only ever hold bread. I sometimes scrape some crust out into the sink — but they do pretty well for 88 cents!
2. Figure out what your mixer can handle. Ok, if you’re thinking you’re going to make 30 loaves by hand, you’ve really lost it. I have to do it in my mixer, and it can’t handle much more than 12 cups of flour. I do add some white flour to ease up the burden on my mixer (it’s easier on the mixer to make white bread, rather than 100% whole wheat). It also can only do about 3 batches/day and it has to rest in between or it will overheat and then I’m mixin’it by hand, and I make it a point to NEVER mix dough by hand. These fragile arm muscle are too weak for that {kissing my guns}. I have a whole post on the Bosch Universal vs The Kitchenaid (I’m a recent convert to one of them).
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3. Figure out where you’re going to put them all. I initially put all my loaves on my wire racks (I wish I had a few more, I should keep an eye open for them at Goodwill). After the next batch is set to come out I move them onto cutting boards (wood being better than plastic) and then onto the counter.
4. I don’t slice the bread. It stays more fresh that way, and I can’t imagine how bad my arms would hurt after slicing all that, not to mention it’s a lot less pretty when you slice it.
5 Grind it baby. I do use my wheat grinder to give about 80% of the flour. I buy wheat at the LDS cannery(you don’t have to be Mormon to shop there)and it’s a LOT cheaper to do that then to buy actual white flour. Plus, it’s freshly ground wheat going into their bread. What isn’t there to love? Man, I practically sound like a Puritan with this post, thank goodness I use a mixer!
6. Clear a few mornings. It’s great to bread done in the morning. It makes your house all warm and smell great. I guess you could do it at night, but I like to let my loaves cool for about 4 hours and then bag them (yes, I bought special bags). I add a little curly ribbon, a card and WHAMO — it’s love in a bag!
I’m not saying this is the present for everyone to make (please don’t, what would I give then?), but you can make many loaves at a time if you rally want to. I could also buy smaller tin and make more at a time. I may foray into that this year what with all the high school teachers El Presidante has.
This is the 4th in a Christmas organization series. You can find the rest of my Christmas posts here.
Be sure to check out all my bread recipes!
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Some other Christmas posts you might enjoy:
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