I must set the record straight, before I start, I've never been able to cook bread ever. Years ago, a friend and I even went to a bread baking course, and while everyone else went home with lovely crusty loaves, I went home with marbles. Bread has been the bane of my life – until this week.
My recent bread baking spree was inspired a few months ago after reading many many online success stories with No Knead Bread. The magical process of kneading bread was always where my previous attempts fell flat. Try as I might, I just couldn't turn a lump of sticky dough into anything more than a lump of hockey puck filler. I figured my hands were too dang cold to generate any warmth in the loaf.
Being the impetuous person that I am, it only took six months before I finally gave the no knead recipe a whirl. Well, blow me down, it turned out amazing. Crispy on the outside, light and soft on the inside. All from my own cold littl hands.
The only downside with the recipe was the timing. While it takes no time at all to mix the dough, and shape the dough, it takes hours upon hours for the dough to rise, and then more hours after it's risen before the loaf finally makes it into the oven for it's next hour of cooking. With our heat here too of late, I found my dough was ready a good 6 hours before I was ready. While the no knead idea is simplicity itself, the time schedule was a nightmare. I made it once again during the week, and again it was so easy to put together any fool could do it (I did) but again all the timing faff drove me batty.
In the middle of this no knead bread baking frenzy I then hit on the idea of making some lebanese pizzas. Not that I have ever made them, or have a recipe, I just thought with a bit of dough, some mince and flavourings we couldn't go far wrong. And...I was right...we didn't go far wrong.
This time I made a simple yeasted dough in the mixer, left it to rise, then pinched and rolled out 24 little hand size pizzas. The beauty of this was still no work on the kneading side of things (the mixer did the work) and, praise be, I made the dough and had it all in the oven within two hours. Now that sort of time schedule works for me.
One step further along the bread making route brings us to tonight, when another batch of bread dough was flung together to accompany our dinner. In between all these batches I did a bit of google research and learnt a thing or two about making a good dough and how it works.
I found a little site about pizza making, written by a man with a passion for the best pizza dough in town. He spent years perfecting his crust, before he decided it was time to work on the toppings - crazy! He explained an awful lot about how flour works and what to look for when making a dough. So with his thoughts in my head, I set to in the kitchen.
Apparently a wet dough works better if you are beating your dough up in your mixer. Being all about ease, my mixer was the star in this process. His second clue was to allow the wet mix to sit for a while before getting into the kneading. This step allows the flour to accept the water which in turn makes the dough come alive.
How did it turn out? The taste was good. There was a light crust and the inside was soft and yummy. I think the batter may have been a tad too wet when I finally cooked it, which may be fine in a good baker's oven, but not mine which was full of moisture from the roast and veg.
There's not much left out of two loaves though, and we still have some dough left in the fridge for tomorrow night's dinner.
Easy Homestyle Bread
Ingredients
5 tsp dry yeast
3 tsp sugar
375ml warm water
300ml warm milk
5 cups bakers flour
2 tsp salt
1tbsp olive oil
In a measuring jug stir 5 level teaspoons of yeast and 3 teaspoons of sugar into 375ml of lukewarm water. Allow to sit for a while, and it will become foamy.
In the bowl of your mixer place 5 cups of bakers flour and 3 teaspoons of salt. Give a quick whizz aroundwith your dough hook so the two are incorporated.
Once the yeast is all foamy, add it and 300ml of warm milk to the flour and start the mixer on slow. It's good to push the raw flour down on the sides too in the beginning just to ensure that it all mixes in.
After a quick mix, the dough will be lumpy and bumpy but completely incorporated. Turn the mixer off, throw a teatowel over the whole lot and go away to fold washing.
After about 15 minutes, come back to the mixer and start again. The dough will have risen in this time too. The picture above of the mixer shows what the dough looks like at this point - quite wet and batter like.
Start the mixer again and let it go slowly for a bit. Add the oil at this stage because you forgot to add it earlier. As the dough becomes less sticky turn the machine up until it's starting to get a good mixing action going. Don't do what I did and walk away from the process or you too may find the dough climbing up into the machines mechanism.
I reckon I beat the dough for about 5 minutes or so. As it was still a bit wet and sticky I now incorporated a little more flour into the dough until it looked about right. What is right? Still a bit wet, but stretchy yet dough like. Knowing i was going to dump this on my cloth with more flour, I didn't want to get the dough too dry just yet.
When I was happy with the dough, the hook came out, and the cloth went back over the bowl and left to rise once again. This time once it gets to double its size, it's ready for final shaping.
I vaguely remember my mum using a cloth to knead her dough on. Not having a stainless steel bench, or even a granite block to start with, a clean table cloth was flung over the kitchen table and floured up ready for the shaping stage.
Dump the dough on the cloth and get fresh with the dry flour. At this point you don't want the dough to stick to you, the cloth or anything else within it's vicinity. I give the dough a few good hand folds and pummels. Nothing too strenuous mind – remember I have no idea what I'm doing. Cut a few chunks off and throw them into an oiled cake tin. Check the bottom picture to see what I'm talking about.
For the top tin in the picture above I took one great gob of dough and stretched it out like a long snake, and then stretched that sideways so it was flat like a huge tongue. Onto this I painted some melted butter, sprinkled parmesan cheese and dried herbs, before rolling it back into a snake. This snake was then wound back around the pan.
These both were then let to rise for a bit, perhaps ten minutes or so. Just prior to cooking I brushed the tops with a beaten egg and threw on either poppy seeds or herbs.
Once there was enough room in the oven, the bread baking began. My oven is old - real old so temperature is pretty much unknown. I was also cooking a roast dinner with roast veg, and had a foil container of carrots bubbling along on the top shelf. The purpose of this bread baking session though was to be able to make a loaf of bread as and when it suited me and my oven, not when the dough wanted to be cooked. So the first loaf (the bun style) went in with the roast in quite a low oven, perhaps 370F. At some stage through this cooking, I turned the oven up to 400F as nothing seemed to be happening too fast and I was becoming impatient. I'm not sure how long it took to cook, maybe 25 mins tops. My imprecise method did not disappoint though. The bread came out brown and well cooked with a slightly crispy crust and a soft bread texture. Not perfect, yet not disappointing.
The snake roll went in next. As the pork roast wasn't cooking well (the oven's very old) the oven was ramped up even higher this time. This cooked much faster on the top than the bottom, which didn't really matter in the end. The flavour was amazing. Considering the amount of cheese inside, this loaf was only slightly savoury - yummy all the same.
The whole process was very satisfying. While I was in the kitchen getting the dinner ready for tonight, I was also able to get some bread together for our dinner. It may not be perfect store bought bread, then again it also doesn't taste like perfect store bought bread. I can see this recipe evolving even further over time, and also see larger quantities baked whenever we have masses of people to feed. It could even work well in our umu, cooked in a camp stove.
There's still another half of the dough resting in the fridge. Tomorrow night I may let Sonny have his hand at forming his own loaf for dinner.
If you look carefully at the finished loaf you'll see that there is little definition between the rolls once it is cooked. This may or may not be because the dough was too wet and didn't have enough strength to support the rolls individually. I might try a little more flour in the next batch and see how it turns out.
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