"Whey" Freshly Baked Bread

This is bread I've made before using whey.

I love bread.  Low-carb diets work really well on me because most of my diet is bread.  Take that out, and I'm basically eating ice cubes and really big gusts of air.  Anyway, there are few things in life as delicious as butter slowly melting on hot-out-of-the-oven bread.


I also love cheese.  I make cheese which leaves me with buckets of whey.  I even have a special container, I call "whey bucket".

Whey is a by-product of cheese.  I think of it as cheese's "whey" less-hot friend (get it, whey = way, haha).  Whey is protein-rich which is why they use it to make protein powder.  But I have no ambitions on tight abs and finely-toned "ubulus which connect to the upper dorsimus" muscles.  So I found a "whey" (okay, I'll stop) to use whey in making bread.  It gives it a wonderful slightly sour, faintly cheesy taste.

The recipe I used is from allrecipes.com, but because it requires a bread machine, I adapted it for the common masses who are without a bread machine (but have an oven).  I'm also using a tiny toaster convection oven to bake my bread so I had to adjust the recipe to tailor to that broke-ass aspect too.

Ingredients
1 cup water (or whey)
2 1/2 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon white sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Put the water/whey, sugar and yeast into a bowl and let it sit for 5 minutes so they can all have their "whey" with each other.  (I really can't stop myself.)

After 5 minutes, stir it all up so the sugar and yeast dissolves.

In another bowl, mix together the flour and salt.  Then toss it into the yeast mixture or vice versa.  Just get the wet and dry together.

Get in there and make some dough.  Knead until it's nice and elastic.

Cover with a damp towel and let it rise until doubled in size.  This took me about an hour and a half, but  that's because I doubled the recipe.  It could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on how much bread you're making, the humidity, the temperature, karma, etc.  It's ready when you poke it and the indent stays.

Punch the dough down and roll it out into a rectangle...ish.  I'm using parchment paper because I hate cleaning up flour on the counter, but you can use a lightly floured surface or parchment paper.

Cut it in half.

Roll the dough up tightly starting from the non-straight edge (see how I went to college?), pounding out any air bubbles you see as you go.  Roll the ends back and forth to taper them.

Take a very sharp knife or razor blade and slash diagonally about two inches apart.  Or you can make one long vertical slash.

Make the slashes pretty deep.  The loaves will rise and puff them out.

Cover them with a damp towel and let rise about 30-50 minutes until doubled in size.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Bake for 20-40 minutes.  I realize that's a big time difference but my oven took 40 minutes.  The recipe says 20-25.  You'll know it's done with it's golden brown.

Slather on some butter or enjoy with some soup.  This bread is also ideal for sub sandwiches.