How to Bake Bread with Kids
One of the best ways to get kids interested in healthy eating is to have them cook right along with you. Children are often much more likely to try new foods, including healthy foods, if they helped to prepare them. Their pride in the finished food and your enthusiastic response are both great reinforcements that set up a lifetime of learning healthy ways to cook and eat. While homemade bread may seem like a complicated task to do with kids, there are many parts of the process that are perfect for little hands. Don't expect perfection, and enjoy the process as much as the product. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- Stand mixer
- Bread ingredients
- Measuring cups
- Measuring spoons
- Bread pans
- Oven
Instructions
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Measure all of your recipe ingredients into your mixing bowl with your kids. Allow them to scoop the ingredients themselves. Explain about scooping flour instead of packing it down, and show them why you do this by packing down a cupful to show the difference in volume.
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Turn the mixer on and give your child the task of keeping track of mixing time. Explain about mixing ingredients thoroughly and about changing textures while mixing. Keep the lesson going while you time the dough rising. Do another fun project together while the dough rises, to show that cooking isn't all hard work, but that you can take enjoyable breaks sometimes.
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Cut off a small piece of dough for your child to knead, even if you're going to knead the rest of the dough in your stand mixer. Let your child knead enough dough to make a good-sized roll for her own dinner. Teach about the different textures of dough through the kneading process, and let her know how to tell when the dough is ready to bake.
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Allow your child to form the dough into rolls and loaves of different shapes. As long as the shapes are relatively uniform in size, you can make rolls in any fantasy shape your kid would like. Let him make vans and trucks, snakes and lions or squiggles and piles of dough. They will all taste good, and he'll gain experience by finding out what shapes work better in the oven and which ones aren't quite so good to bake.
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References
- Photo Credit loaf of bread image by Danuta Kania from Fotolia.com
