This is a follow-up to Mat’s previous post which served as a prelude to yesterday’s “Yakitate fest”. Tone, Mat, Minh, Jim, and Menghis came over to watch anime, play video games, and (most imporantly) bake bread.
We each setup on a different section of the kitchen bench and got to work mixing ingredients and kneeding dough. With his wealth of knowledge and experience, Mat guided us through the whole process. His bandana denotes his superiority. I’m sporting a head-band to stay hygenic.
The major outcome of the day were that fun was had by all, but here are a few other statistics.
- Best bread: Tone & Minh
- Heidi’s pick (after blind taste test): Mat
- Total bread making time: over 9 hours!
- Lessons learnt: You can’t get a yeast infection from undercooked bread.
I look forward to our future baking adventures! (More photos after the jump.)
After mixing the ingredients and kneeding the dough, we made them into balls.
And placed these balls into our respective rice cookers to ferment. Minh’s rice cooker was by far the most advanced! This fermentation process took around an hour.
After initial concerns that “this freaking dough will never rise!” everyone’s dough rose to cover the bottom of the rice cooker. The smell of yeast was fairly strong.
After cooking for an hour. We flipped them over. They were actually starting to look like bread at this point!
We flipped them a total of two times each to make sure that they were cooked all around. This is a shot of Minh and Tone’s bread (it looked the best of the three).
And here is the final spread which included bread (obviously), butter, chocolate, cheese, and apple!
Wow…. wish I was there. š Looked fun!
Well, i made my own Japan #2 tonight, and it seemed faily successful, it looked like the ones on the pictures. To be honest though, it’s not fluffy at all! Mine has kind of a scone/damper consistency and taste. Still, quite good.