[Sca-cooks] question about breads

[Maggie MacDonald]

At 10:17 AM 6/1/2005,Alexa said something like:
>  In a few modern cookbooks I have read the dough being
>frozen prior to rising, then when needed, bring dough
>out of the freezer, cover and let thaw and rise, then
>bake.  Has anyone tried this?  With everything else I
>will be doing the day or 2 before, I think it would be
>easier to thaw in stages and bake, then to have to
>keep stopping in the middle of chopping veggies, ect
>to mix dough,etc.

This was the method I used to do the feast for Calafian Anniversary last 
November. It worked out really well.  The only flaw I had was that instead 
of having a flatter hearth bread, they were very very happy breads so they 
ended up being huge round puffy loaves.  The populace was gifted with the 
scent of hot baking bread as they walked into the feast hall, so that also 
helped.

>I have also heard of completeing the process and then
>freezing the baked bread then thawing to serve.  My
>only experience w/ this was w/ bread bowls that we
>made for stews.  At that point, you want it kind of
>day old/hard or you end up w/ mush. I don't want hard
>bread for feast.
>
>Ideas??
>
>Alexa

I've also baked up a bazillion breads in advance and then thawed for use 
later.  At May Potrero war I made up about 100 fist sized stuffed bread 
pockets and froze them 5 days before war, transported them frozen, then let 
them thaw over the weekend.  They turned out quite nice!!  I didn't notice 
any issues with the bread crust, but at that point I really wasn't too 
fussy about quality (I was still kinda wigging over making sure that 
everybody was _fed_).

Regards, and good luck!!
Maggie MacD.