Let Them Bake Bread
I walk down the aisles of the grocery store - overflowing with a cornucopia of choices - and then I see the bread: mainly puffy bags of nothingness that seem to be inexpensive, claim to be nutritious and taste...well, it doesn't taste like anything, really.
And then there's bread: the stuff that goes right for your sense of smell, that fresh baking bread aroma, a direct attack on your salivary glands so that you can almost taste it before it even hits your tongue.
Problem is, as we all know, that home-made bread thing is hugely time consuming. Right?
Bollocks!!!!
(read on)
Bread on the Farm
Back in the days when I had farm-fresh milk and eggs on my doorstep - literally, meaning I had to wear rubber boots - I baked 12-16 loaves a week using a beautiful little Scandinavian wood stove with an insulated, brick-lined oven. It wasn't very big, but it was as efficient as all get-out and there wasn't a cold or hot spot in the oven.
Fast forward 20+ years to an electric oven in the city - and my forays into that bread-making past have been, with a few exceptions, disappointments.
Yes, I still make a mean batch of bagels (the goose-egg variety were the best...but these aren't bad) and haven't lost my touch with Challah. But those are specialty doughs that almost require intentional incompetence to screw up.
The regular old loaf of bread was eluding me. For two decades. Doorstops, 27 . Edible loaves, 0.
The Bread Machine from Hell Week
So one day we're at the Coop - it's "Member Appreciation Week" which should really come with the tag "From Hell!" Coop members from far and wide - members who shop once a year - friends of members - show up in droves. It takes two hours to buy a package of toilet paper.
Anyway, they do have some terrific sales during the week from hell, and one of the sale items was a bread machine. I figure if I've lost my bread-making mojo, maybe technology can bail me out.
Wrong.
If I was interested in building a small hut out of bread, the bread machine I owned for three whole days would be my production tool of choice: hard, impenetrable, but shaped perfectly for unskilled building construction.
I tasted part of one - the one that looked most like a failed brick (I can't bring myself to say "that looked most like a loaf of bread" cause that would be lying) - so I took a bite of it and then I tasted raw flour. And the flour tasted better.
Dough's a Messy Business
I remember my baking day marathons. The idea was to do a whole pile of production cause even a little bit was so time consuming and messy - requiring huge cleanup big or small - that volume equaled efficiency. Right?
Wrong again.
It turns out that minimal handling, healthy ingredients, patience and a few simple tools produce high quality bread that requires very little work.
Bread-Making Drudgery? No Knead for That
The utensils:
- A heavy 4-qt bowl (non metallic)
- Measuring spoons and a 1-cup measuring cup
- Spatula or flat-edged wooden spoon
- Pizza stone (can substitute a ceramic or pyrex bowl or baking tray)
- Wax or parchment paper
- 3 cups flour (whole white flour or bread flour)
- 2 tsps salt
- 1/4 tsp dried instant or breadmaking yeast
- 1 1/2 to 2 cups warm water
You make a fairly moist dough, enough for one decent-sized loaf of bread, you leave it alone for a day, you come back and bring the oven up to temperature, handle the dough for a couple of minutes, and an hour later you're eating delicious, homemade fresh bread that looks, smells and tastes like it came out of a specialty bakery shop.
So enough of the writing...the best way to show you how to do this is to just show you how to do this.
Pictures and videos are in the works.
-g
