Last Oatmeal Bread

There has been an interruption in my posting and I apologize. We had a death in the family and I spent the first couple of weeks and weekends in November going back and forth to Mississippi where my family lives.

I made the last oatmeal bread on Halloween weekend, uploaded the pictures and then went to Mississippi and never posted the recipe. The recipe came from the Bread Cook Book from Better Homes and Gardens. My edition was published in 1963.

Here are the ingredients:

2 pkg active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/4 cups boiling water
1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats,
1/2 cup light molasses
1/3 cup shortening (I used butter)
1 T salt
6 - 6 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 beaten eggs



While the yeast is softening in warm water, I put the other ingredients up to the flour in a mixing bowl and allowed it to cool.

Then I added 2 cups of the flour, followed by the eggs and the softened yeast. After kneading, the picture below is what the dough looked like.


It was quite happy to rise well in a relatively short time for an egg bread.



While the bread was rising, I greased the loaf pans - I used three 8X3.5 pans - and sprinled them on the bottom and side with extra oatmeal. Then the loaves rose in the loaf pans.



I let it rise a little long so the loaves were tall when they went into the oven! The oven temp was 375 for 40 minutes. I was supposed to use egg white and water to brush the loaves and then to sprinkle them with oatmeal, but I forgot.

The finished loaf was a little lop-sided but delicious.


Since my November did not go as planned, I'm not baking a type of bread this month. Instead I am baking holiday breads from now (the middle of November) until the end of the year. I had planned to bake rolls in November but I'll save that experiment for 2010.

I'll thaw and comparison taste the oatmeal breads tomorrow.