To my Daytime Tri-Cities friends: Thanks for watching and claiming your free cookbook. Feel free to share this PDF link with your family and friends. Here’s the link I promised for more Irish Soda Bread recipes: http://bakingwithjulie.com/warm-up-your-winter-with-potato-soup-and-irish-soda-bread/
And down at the bottom of this post, I have the recipe I’m using right now to make bread for my family, White Loaves.
Y’all stay safe and happy baking!
This cookbook is from a week-long Teen Baking Boot Camp I taught at East Tennessee State University back in the summer of 2017. I designed the course to teach a wide range of basic baking skills to a group of summer camp kids that were eager to learn more about the love of baking. We had a blast and ended the week with a TV-style competition show-down with teams beating the clock to create their best dishes.
When I first heard about the coronavirus outbreak in China back in January of this year, I never dreamed it would impact the world as it has. Fear, panic, sickness, economic hardship, separation of loved ones, and even death—it seems selfish to bemoan the shortage of toilet paper and the temporary inconvenience of social distancing in the face of such suffering.
We can feel powerless in the midst of such overwhelming circumstances. And yet, surely there is something we can do. I remember the famous words of Mr. Rogers, the beloved host of the children’s television show: in times of crisis, look for the helpers.
In the midst of their global pandemic, we are all inspired by stories of neighbors helping neighbors, Italians singing opera from their balconies, Canadians creating sharing networks, and the selfless health care professionals around the globe, risking their own health as they tirelessly sacrifice to care for the rest of us.
There isn’t much I can contribute to the global fight against Covid-19, but as I thought about all the kids stuck at home now that schools are closed, I remembered the class I’d taught at ETSU. And I figured the least I could do was offer the cookbook from that course to those kids and their families for free.
With restaurants closing and folks told to hunker down at home, now is the perfect time to learn how to bake. That’s true whether you’re in elementary school or you’re an adult faced with having to eat out of your kitchen for a change. Baking is fun and the perfect distraction. It’s also empowering to make delicious food for yourself and the ones you love.
And while there is little we can control in this situation, we can each control how we respond to it. We want to look back on these days and be proud of the choices we made. We want to take this down time to grow closer as a family and as a community, despite the short-term isolation. We’re in this thing together—even if we have to keep a ‘social distance’ of 6 feet.
I pray you’ll find this cookbook to be a blessing and that your heart and your home will be filled with health, peace and love. And that you’ll be able to carry with you, into a much brighter future, the precious lessons you learned during these difficult days.
Blessings,
Julie Voudrie
March 18, 2020
P.S. I’d love to hear about your baking adventures using this cookbook! So leave me a comment and let me know what you’ve baked. Just keep baking!
White Loaves
Here’s a short version of the bread recipe I’m using for my family, out of the Baking with Julia Child cookbook. It rises quickly, bakes nicely and is easy to slice. Just watch that you don’t let your loaves over rise, which I’ve done by mistake more than once. 🙂 I use a heavy-duty mixer, but you can also make this by hand. Makes 2 9X5 loaves.
Put 2 1/2 cups warm water in your mixer bowl, along with 1 tablespoon each of yeast and sugar. Once dissolved, attach your dough hook and turn on mixer. Add a total of 7 cups of bread flour, starting with about half of it, add 1 tablespoon of salt, then adding the rest of the flour a cup at a time, saving the last bit as needed to make a dough that cleans the inside of the bowl and isn’t too sticky. Knead at medium speed for about 10 minutes. Mix in 1/4 cup of soft, unsalted butter, a tablespoon at a time, until well combined. It’s likely your dough will get loose again, but keep mixing and it will come back together.
Form dough into a ball and put in a large oiled bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm place until dough doubles in size, 45 minutes to 1 hour. Punch down dough and divide in half. Make sure all the bubbles are out, form into loaves, and place in 2 greased 9 X 5 loaf pans. Cover with plastic wrap until dough rises a bit over the tops of the pans, about 45 minutes.
Bake at 375 degrees for 35 to 45 minutes. If you have a thermometer, inside of loaves are 200 degrees when done. Remove from pans and let cool on racks before slicing.
