Monday Q&A | Bread Questions & a Savings/Budget/ING Question

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

First, several of you asked if I could put a link to Joshua’s 365 blog beneath my header, and I’m pleased to say that I did get around to that. I actually put a link under the header here and also under my 365 header. Hopefully that’ll make it easy for you to find his blog. And of course, subscribing by email is a good way to go if you want to make sure you don’t miss a post (it’s free and we promise you won’t be spammed! Just enter your email address in the box on the right side of his blog.).

I was wondering if you could talk more about how you got into baking so much of your family’s bread supply. Is it something you eased into, or did you just jump right in? Is it a tradition in your family to make homemade bread? When did you start bread-making? Which recipes are your favorite?

–Megan from Crooked Seams

I started baking bread early in my teen years. My mom made homemade bread on and off when I was younger, and since I enjoyed eating it so much, I wanted to learn to make it myself so that I could have it more often!

Once I’d learned the basic of making yeast bread, I baked up a storm for my family. I made everyday sandwich bread, a sweet bread for breakfast once a week, and plenty of breadstuffs to go with our dinner meals.

When I got married, I didn’t do quite as much baking because the only two people available to eat my baked goods were Mr. FG and me. But two years after we were married, Joshua was born, and then the other 3 babies followed within a few years, and we now have a little crew of hungry mouths. So, I bake a lot more now than I did back when our family was smaller.

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite yeast recipe because I like pretty much every yeast bread I’ve ever tried (except for a rosemary loaf I made as a teen. The rosemary was like pine needles in the bread!). I really love a fresh-from-the-oven slice of whole wheat bread, though, and I have to say that the cherry danishes I recently made are probably one of my favorite sweet breads ever.

I have two bread baking questions. The first is about the rolling of the dough out, and then rolling it into a loaf shape — if a slice can sort of be unrolled along the original lines, should it be more tightly rolled up?

The second is, I have frequently read that you can tell that a loaf is done if when you tap the bottom it sounds hollow. If it doesn’t — will it be OK to pop it back in the oven or will interrupting the proces be detrimental to the baking?

-Karen, aka Mom of 3 Monkeys

The loaf in your first question actually sounds like it might have too much flour. My bread dough is usually soft enough to kind of stick together as I roll it up. A dough that doesn’t stick to itself when rolled up is probably a little too dry, so I’d recommend trying to use less flour next time.

You can indeed tap the bottom of a loaf to tell if it’s done, though that’s not an entirely scientific method. If you’re gentle, and if the loaf is nearly done, you should be able to take the loaf out and tap the bottom without causing harm to the loaf.

Cook’s Illustrated always recommends using an instant-read thermometer to test for doneness (is that even a word??). They say that “rustic breads should be baked to an internal temperature of 200 to 210 degrees, while richer breads are done at 190 to 195 degrees.”

I’ve been baking bread for so long, I can almost always tell if a loaf is done just by looking at it, but until you’re that comfortable, you could use the thermometer method.

If you do use a thermometer, stick it into the side of the loaf, not the end. That way the hole will only go through one slice of the bread instead of multiple slices.

Been thinking about budgets with the new year just around the corner and am wondering if you have any advice on the envelope system. Seems like from your posts that you use ING accounts like savings envelopes. I totally get how you divide big payments by 12 and save the amount each month. Which works in theory but not if your car insurance bill is due in January! No one ever seems to address how to get that system rolling when you don’t have a spare $5000 in cash to use as seed money until your accounts get built up.

We’re not in dire straits. I can pay my car insurance bill in January, but then I may not have enough to fund all my envelopes fully that month. I was planning to pull everything out of our savings except the last $1000 to fund my IRA. The remaining $1000 would be left for emergencies, but the car insurance would be half of that, leaving us with a pretty small emergency fund. And car insurance doesn’t seem like an emergency!

Would love to hear any thoughts or help you have to offer!

-Jenny

Hmm. To me this sounds more like a cash flow issue than a savings envelope issue. If you don’t have enough money to put away each month for your car insurance bill, you may need to adjust your budget (put less in your IRA, put a little more into your car insurance category).

If your bill is due every January, then you should start saving for that bill right after you pay it. $416 should go into a Car Insurance ING savings account every month, and if you do that, you’ll be able to pay the bill in January. This is how our Christmas and vacation accounts work…we start saving again for Christmas in January and we start saving for vacation as soon as we come home from the beach.

If you still feel like you need to jumpstart your ING accounts, you could consider taking on some side work on a temporary basis or you could sell some of your belongings to raise some cash.

(if you’re new around here, I must tell you that I think ING savings accounts are the bomb-diggety-bomb, and I highly recommend opening one! or ten.)

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Have a lovely Monday! I’m off to the gym after breakfast (since Monday is Mr. FG’s day off, I get to go in the morning, which is lovely. Well, as lovely as a sweat-inducing activity can be!).

disclosure

Today’s 365 post: Bubble Lights