When suppertime rolled around at the Roediger House on Wednesday night, after yet another scorching summer day that compelled me to keep all activities inside, I went with homemade chicken salad (with herbs from my kitchen garden) but jazzed it all up by putting it on sandwiches with some homemade loaf bread.
This quick return to the Roediger House dinner table of sous-vide split chicken breast chicken salad was in part because it has been awfully darned delicious these last few months...but also because it sounded like the perfect thing to put on my first genuine effort at making a loaf of bread.
Mind you: I've got a bread machine and used to regularly have fresh-baked bread from it to go with whatever dinner I was serving. But that stopped being a thing back in, oh, 2012, I think...? Loaves of yeast bread from scratch just haven't been a chosen endeavor for me. I'm quite proud of the round challah I made, back in 2013, and I thought I might at least return to that as a special treat from time to time, but so far, not so much! Anyway: I made bread.
Was the dough all too sticky, probably? Did it rise wildly and spill out of the loaf pan on the second rise? Did I have to fix my mess by dividing it into two smaller loaf pans and giving it a third rise, leading to small and dainty sandwiches? Have I now ordered a true bread loaf pan from Amazon? You may now tally all those yeses. But the key question is...how was the bread? I must say: Quite good!
Also, now that I've begun putting my Joule sous vide immersion circulator to more regular use, I decided to break down and look into a vacuum sealer foodsaver appliance. Since this is another novelty for me, I let the reviews on Amazon direct me to a cheaper one that customers were still quite pleased with. So far, I'm liking it, both for prepping future sous vide meals to toss into the freezer and also for saving leftovers. And it worked well that afternoon to help me bag and cook those chicken breasts in the immersion bath.
Adapted from "The Best Classic Chicken Salad Recipe," from J. Kenji López-Alt, Chief Culinary Consultant of SeriousEats.com. [Published 03 June 2015 / Updated 17 April 2020]
"Soft and Sweet Buttermilk Honey Bread," by Beth Kirby of The Local Milk blog. [Published 09 April 2014]
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