rice cooker bread

rice cooker bread
Originally uploaded by nitaspitas.

Rice cookers are amazing things. Especially the new ones that have non-stick pans and can cook everything from rice to soup. And apparently bread.

In the middle of watching Yakitate!! Japan today, Jo and I saw a recipe for making bread in a rice cooker. After watching a season of this show, we were both itching to make bread, so I went out and got some yeast, and we started making it this afternoon.

It was hard at first, because the measurements we got were all metric, and we used wheat flour instead of white, so the water absorption was different, but it ended up turning out okay. (It was also too salty because the recipe didn't say unsalted butter, and I didn't really think about it until afterwards...)

Rice cookers are actually really nice for making a fluffy bread--you can use the pan as a mixing bowl, then set it into the rice cooker to rise (it's warm and covered all at once!), and it keeps it warm after it's done. The only difference is the crust--it's not crispy like oven-baked bread. And it takes a lot longer to bake because the temperature in a rice cooker is much lower than that of an oven. It took about an hour of prep time (because we didn't really know what we were doing...), two hours for the bread to rise twice, and three hours (turning the bread every hour) to cook. Not too much work once the bread is kneaded, but six hours to wait for bread is kind of long...