Adding Flour for Making Braided Bread

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a braided wreath of bread. This next step is one where you might make a mess, so be fully prepared to clean something up after you do this next step. I've got my flour here, and I've got an extra measuring cup I'm just going to use to put the flour in, just a little bit at a time. For the first couple of cups of flour, I just dump them straight in here with the thing off, because if it's on you're just going to fling flour everywhere and make a mess. Let's get two or three cups in here, just enough to start to pull it all together. Now you want to pull this up, and just to keep from making a mess, I want to take one of my towels and wrap it around it for a second, just when I turn it on. Because what will happen is that it will throw flour everywhere, and I really want to make sure that it doesn't make a huge mess. Just to let it get stirred in, just for that first few seconds. See, now you can pull your towel back, and you've not made a tremendous mess. You've probably made a small mess, if any mess at all. Do you see that flour sticking to the sides of the bowl? I'm not too worried about that right at this second. I'm just going to turn this up, and what will happen is that some of that will pull away naturally. We're just going to sit here and let this go for a minute; try to get as many lumps as we can out of it, because this is all about the even distribution of the flour and the liquid. Turn it up a little bit more. The whisk attachment is not going to hit the sides of the bowl. It's not going to hit, and scrape everything down. What we'll do is turn it off, lower the bowl down, grab our spatula and scrape the sides down. You'll see that there are huge pockets of flour just sitting on the sides here. That's completely normal. Now what we're going to do is add a little more flour back into it, just a couple more cups. I'm already making a mess; look at me go. Raise this back up, and turn it on and we'll be back in just a second."