Monthly Archives: October 2013

The Power Cost To Bake A Bread Machine Loaf of Bread

Climate, Energy, Environment, Global, Kitchen, ,

DSC00770 Bread machine with maximum power draw of 430 Watts.   The average program time, which includes mixing and rising time, before baking,  is 3 1/4 hours.  If during this amount of time the maximum power usage such as that required to  bake at the highest temperature for the entire 3 1/4 hours, the power used would be about 1,400 watts used for the whole time.  This is 1.4 kilowatt-hours.   It would cost  us what a Kilowatt- hour costs on our electricity bill.

But, the machine does not always draw that much power, since much of the time the machine is kneading , and incubating the loaf-in-progress at a merely warm temperature for getting the yeast to grow, so really the number of kilowatt hours used is probably less than 1 kilowatt-hour, which may cost around $0.10.  Therefore,  the electricity alone costs much less than two pounds of ready made bread.  

There is the equivalent of 33.4 Kilowatt-hours in one gallon of gas.  So the equivalent amount of gasoline to power the bread machine for three hours is roughly  1 kilowatt hour  divided by 33.4 kilowatt hours, or 3% of a gallon, or the equivalent of driving a little less than a mile.

Here is another way to look at  the CO2 production of a person  The average person puts about 2 lbs of CO2 into the air in a day.   This is 1/10 th the amount of CO2 produced by using one gallon of gas.  

A person uses about the energy of a 100 watt light bulb, which is about 2.4 Kilowatt hours per day.  This 2.4 kilowatt hours divided by 33.4 kilowatt hours per gallon of gas is equivalent to about 1.4 pounds of CO2 per day.  Close enough to the above estimate of 2 pounds CO2 per day mentioned above.

Anyway, a bread machine contributes less CO2 to the air per loaf than a person contributes in a day.

 

 

 

 

Unbromated Bread, Recipe #2

Health, Kitchen,

DSC00770  A bread machineDSC00771 The bread pan which make up to a 2 lb loaf of  bread.

This time I mostly  used my bread machine recipe  for Country White  Bread from the  Kitchen Pro Regal Collection Recipe Book.

Add these ingredients (all at room temperature) in order to the bread pan:

  • 9 ounces milk
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons butter
  • 4 1/2  cups unbromated bread flour
  • 3 teaspoons sugar
  • 1 packet active dry yeast

Assembly:

Use the recommended setting if you are using a bread machine.  This recipe used the setting #5 for sweet bread, even though it is not sweet, because this setting bakes the bread at a lower temperature, which the writers wanted, because it contains protein in the egg and milk.

This made a firm, fine-grained loaf quite unlike Unbromated Bread Recipe #1.

 

 

Carbon Dioxide from Methane

Climate, Education, Environment, Global, , , , ,

DSC00729A model of a methane molecule and two oxygen molecules, the reactants  when we burn methane (natural gas) in air.  The methane molecules is made of one carbon atom (black)  and four hydrogen atoms (white).   Methane is  a  hydrocarbo.  It is also a fossil fuel.  The element oxygen occurs in the atmosphere as two oxygen atoms (red) combined into a molecule.   When the methane burns, the above reactants become rearranged into the products below, with the release of energy.

DSC00728 These are the products formed, carbon dioxide and water,  when methane burns in oxygen.  The leftmost molecule is carbon dioxide, made up of one carbon atom (black)  and two oxygen atoms (red).  Each of the two water molecules is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  Carbon dioxide is the greenhouse gas which is put into the atmosphere when methane, or any fossil fuel is burned.  This is  the source of our global warming.