Here in the Philippines they don’t bake often, so I was questioned and asked if I could bake bread, now I’ve made bread a few times, each time it tasted delish!
I ask my dad to email me a recipe cause I didn’t bring any with me, he email me a Vienna bread recipe, which I have never made before. But, hey, how hard can it be if I’ve make bread before?
We go to the grocery store and purchase the ingredients for the bread, going to three different places before we found yeast. But now for the next time we make it we’ll know where to go! In the base we have to measuring cups or utensils but, Gina, the base director’s wife had some, so we went to her house thankfully they were in English units as well as in metric, because they use metric here like most of the rest of the world.
Because it takes a while to make bread we decided we were going to make it at night for breakfast. We start around 8:00ish. Now this bread recipe is very different then the one I was used to making. We started by heating up the milk, water and sugar. This wasn’t too hard. Next we mixed the dry ingredients. Again simple-breezy! We combined the wet with the dry and started mixed then, added more flour! We were having fun, laughing a lot. We have to knead for 10 minutes, but before we can do that overseer Dreb says we have to sanitized the table, and of course we listen! Now we can begin our kneading, little drops of perspiration start to form on our brow because the Philippines is a hot place. Ten minutes seemed to be forever!
Filipinos love to tell stories, and wild stories. Many of the stories are about Pedro and Juan, bout some random fruit, or how the God created humans. So while we wait for our bread to rise we listen to stories and laugh some more! We played a card game called “Monkey Monkey” which is a no-brainer type game all based on what you draw.
Our bread has risen, although it didn’t get too big we decided to continue anyway because it was going on 10 already. Vienna bread has to be rolled out, a task I’m not too good at, plus we didn’t have a rolling pin, so we get the cups we drink out of, the cups aren’t that tall. Rolling our the dough takes a long time and my piece of dough didn’t look as successful as Gigi’s either. All is going very well though and we poke fun at each other’s dough and laugh a lot.
As we wait for it to rise again we play “Tongits” another card game in which I am not too good at, I learned in form my Auntie April before I came so I would know how to play a Filipino card game. The dough looks good! We turn on the oven trying to figure out what temperature is the right degrees in Celsius. We put the bread in at about 11:40 and start playing more cards again, well at 12:10 we go check on our break and it is very brown! UH-OO! We quickly take it out! Man o man, the bottom of our bread is black!
The taste was ok, although next time we’ll put less salt and a bit more sugar. We ate it for breakfast with hot chocolate in which we dipped it cause it was very hard on the outside. Reluctantly on my part we gave some to Gina, I felt bad for giving browned bread away. Then Gigi, decides we should share it with the landlord neighbor! Who shares burnt bread? Filipinos, because it’s not everyday you get to bake bread!
ahaha hopefully the cornmeal will help a lil with that bottom!
p.s. I don’t roll mine out–too complicated! that looks pretty good tho…might have to bake me some bread this week. perfect fall weather for it here now
You are starting to be like the Filipinos by telling us a good story! The bread looks delish even tho it might have been burnt, at least you got yours to rise! Teach them Rebekah’s grilled flat bread, not so much work.