We love homemade bread. In fact we very rarely buy bread of any kind. Very rarely. I enjoy making bread and buns for my family. But I like to do it FAST. We eat an amazing amount of buns around here. Papa takes bags and bags of them to work and I have to work very hard to keep up with his intake. LOL. He eats them all day long. They make up about 1/2 of his lunch and breakfast for work. Needless to say I bake a lot. A lot of buns anyway. Sometimes I get tired of buns and make bread for a while but it's all the same recipe. I just shape it differently or add more whole wheat flour. The way I do it is very simple. I let my breadmachine do all the work. Well most of the work. I spend very little time on it. I put my breadmaker on dough you see and just put everything in the breadmachine bucket and push a button. Then 2 hours later when the lid of my machine is lifting from the risen bread dough I grab it. Shape it and let it rise in a nice warm spot. Beside the wood stove, in the sunshine or on the working dryer. Then when it's more then double it's size I turn the oven on and bake it. One batch makes 4 small loaves or 24 buns or 2 loaves and 12 buns. My recipe is very simple.
2 cups warm water
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp yeast
2 tsps salt
& about 1/2 cup butter, bacon fat or oil, depending on the day.
Then I let that sit for a few minutes while my yeast works, butter melts. When it's nice and puffy I add flour. Mostly I do 3 cups of white flour and 3 cups of whole wheat flour. Unless I'm making bread (2 white, 4 whole wheat) or hotdog/hamburger buns (4 white, 2 whole wheat). If I make cin. rolls with the dough I add more sugar. But I rarely add eggs, you could if you like, because I find that it moulds faster if I do. Not that there is much left to mould after Papa gets ahold of them. I bake the buns for about 15 minutes at 350F and the bread about 30 minutes. Cin. Rolls just until they brown nicely. About 20 minutes and then ice them while they are still a bit warm. We often make frybread on days that I've got a batch going. Fry bread is easy and my kids love it. Just take a ball of your risen in the breadmaker dough and pull gently at the sides until it is fairly flat. Then fry it in butter on a medium hot pan (if your using cast iron like I am watch it doesn't get too hot as it can very quickly) until it's browned on both sides. We eat these with jam and cheese and some times sausage. My sister in law introduced these to me years ago and for a while it almost became a staple in our diet.
