Sorry. I blew it again. Hit 'post' instead of 'save draft', hence an introduction placeholder post with just a couple of pictures!
I finally got my oven sorted and kitchen almost finished and being the impatient sort, ordered loads of ingredients and cookware from a baker supply shop in Chiang Mai and have been attempting to create the perfect bread roll recipe. Yes, I'm calling them bread rolls but you can call them what you will! In the UK, the list of terms for this simple 'lump' of baked dough is endless depending on your location. Bread cakes, tea cakes, rolls, baps, buns, stotties, balm cakes, the list goes on and on!
In it's basic form, making bread is simple. It takes just a few ingredients but to make bread well, you need a certain level of understanding of how the process works. There is a lot of chemistry involved! The base ingredients are flour, yeast and a fat.
The shop in Chiang Mai carries 26 different brands of bread flour from all over the world. I settled on this unbleached, South Korean Brand with a protein level of 13.3%. The more protein, the more gluten that's created which gives bread its doughy, chewy texture. The quantities of ingredients can be altered slightly to create a finished product to suit an individual's personal taste. In my case, I took a recipe for traditional Scottish morning rolls and made a few slightly varying batches until I was happy.
As for the yeast, I have settled on a French brand, SAF which is widely available here in the hope that it may help me bake better baguettes, that's currently a work in progress but I'm getting there.
Anyway, that's enough for now. Hope I've just about covered my error with a brief introduction and the full post, technique, ingredients and instructions will follow shortly. Apologies again to the @foodiesbeehive, I'll hopefully make up for it in a couple of days with a post worthy of your fine community :-)
Thank-you
Martin
