It is amazing to remember how they could bake without a written recipe - I so wish I had spent more time in the kitchen with both my Mom and Grandmom.
For sure. Many young folks think heating up a prepared, packaged item is cooking
I have some recipes memorized for baking but for many I use a recipe. I often do not follow the instructions though. For example, the king arthur fudgey brownie recipe has a silly instruction-add cocoa powder to the eggs and mix until smooth. This makes hard clumps of cocoa in the brownies. I do not know if they think that is a good thing but I do not like it at all.
I add the cocoa powder to the flour, salt and baking powder in the sifter. Works much better.
Once you have memorized the basic recipe for bread dough you can make bread, rolls, cinnamon rolls and doughnuts from that recipe. For cinnamon rolls and doughnuts, you use milk instead of water, butter instead of oil and add more sugar.
Like this:
1C scalded milk cooled to 110
1\2C melted butter
1 egg
1\2C sugar
1 pck sugar
1\2 tsp salt
approx. 4C flour
Sprinkle yeast over 110 degree milk and let sit for 5 minutes. Add egg, sugar, salt and melted butter. Mix in flour 1 cup at a time until it is a sticky dough and then kneed in more flour until dough is smooth and stretchy, about 5 minutes.
Let rise for 30 to 60 minutes until doubled. At this point, you can make them into cinnamon rolls or doughnuts.
For bread, you would sub out water for milk and oil for butter-reduce oil to a couple of tablespoons. Sugar goes down to 1\4 cup. Salt stays the same. This will make one loaf of bread. To make more, add water, yeast and salt to the recipe along with more oil. more flour too of course but I never measure flour. I add it until the dough is the correct stiffness.
