My Mother-in-law’s secret to Homemade Bread

Fresh green peas picked straight from the garden, a ripe red tomato picked fresh off the vine, a warm chocolate chip cookie fresh from the oven, and a slice of freshly baked homemade bread smothered with butter and honey. Those are a few of my favorite foods that make my mouth water just thinking about them. The first two, it’ll be a while before I am enjoying them, but the other two are possible. In fact, the hot slice of homemade bread is in my very near future.
When I was newly married to my Farmer, I knew my mother-in-law always made bread for her family, so in order to please my new husband, I figured I should provide homemade bread also. This really worried me. I did not have experience in baking bread. Well, to be honest, I did not have much experience in cooking period! Remember, I was pretty young when we married. Thankfully, my mother-in-law shared her secret with me. I sure was thankful when she shared. Rhodes frozen bread dough. Yep, and boy was I shocked! But….oh what a relief I felt! It fit right into my way of cooking……Easy!

Using Rhodes, my bread always turns out great. Ok, usually turns out great. The hardest part about baking Rhodes frozen bread dough is being there at the right time to put it in the oven. This is were I am bad. I have a tendency to be somewhere else when it’s time to be put in the oven. This makes my loaves a bit large and a bit airy because they raised a bit to long. The bread is still good to eat though. Unless I let them raised way to long. I learned that it’s ok when this happens. Because the dough then can be turned into cinnamon rolls. My Farmer told me that growing up, his family loved it when his mom would let it raise to much (well, I’m sure everyone in the family but her). It meant they were getting home made cinnamon rolls for dessert! She would take the dough out of the pans, punch it back down, and roll it out into cinnamon rolls. It makes very yummy cinnamon rolls. However, when this happens, you still have no bread. My suggestion is to always have another bag of frozen dough in the freezer, so you can try again the next day. And make sure the second batch doesn’t rise to much!

One more little secret my mother-in-law told me was not to wash my bread pans every time with soap and water or the bread will have a tendency to stick. You can just wipe them out a bit with a paper towel. I still use Crisco shortening to grease the pans rather then the spray stuff. It doesn’t seem to leave a build up as bad. Just my opinion.

As I said at the beginning, a hot slice of bread with butter and honey is soo yummy. My idea of “hot” verses my Farmers idea of “hot” are different. I wait until it has cooled a bit, say at least 20 minutes. He says that’s way to long. He wants his end slice within 5 minutes of coming out of the oven. Which slicing bread that hot and fresh leaves the loaf in a miss shape, which bothers me, but not him. And it is all about him now, isn’t it?!?

Speaking of which, I believe I best go check on the bread. OR it will be my Farmer that’s Livin’ the life this evening……Eating cinnamon rolls.