Bread Making – Part II – That Really WASN’T So Hard!

OK – last night I spoke with my mum again & this time, and with her encouragement (and some research) I decided that I actually COULD bake bread, using the “No Knead” recipe and my Pyrex casserole dish.

So… I started the dough last night.  The cool part of using this particular recipe is that it required almost no effort and absolutely zero kneading.  My kind of effort!  The dough is simple – flour, salt, yeast & water.  Yes, really, that’s all!   You stir it up until it’s just mixed and then you cover it and literally ignore it for about 20 hours.

This morning I took a look at the bowl and holy SMOKES – it did something cool overnight!  The dough – yes, it was really dough after all of that sitting – it even smelled yeasty like bread dough should!

 Jasmine and I headed out for today’s walk – 11 KM – and arrived home a couple of hours later.  Still not time to touch the bread dough – so I had my shower & then some lunch and then took herself off in the car to get some groceries.

Home again, and still not time to touch the dough, I made up a pot of spaghetti sauce – some for dinner tonight, the rest to freeze for making more spaghetti as well as lasagna. 

FINALLY… time to touch the dough.

Hm.  First I had to turn it out onto a “lightly floured” board.  First question to myself was what is lightly floured? It turns out that lightly floured was actually a little more flour than I had on the board – but that’s OK, I just added more.  I was to fold it a couple of times and then let it sit and rest for 15 minutes.

Resting done, the next step was another 2 hours of rising time, this time after coating the outside with flour or cornmeal.  I couldn’t find my cornmeal and so this time I used wheat germ – can’t hurt, right? Oven AND Pyrex container heated to a toasty 450*F, the dough gets “flipped” into the container so that the seam is pointing up.  Lid back on, into the hot hot oven it went for 30 minutes.  Then the lid came off and it baked for another 20 minutes until it was lovely and golden brown.

It’s now cooling on a rack in the kitchen and I’m VERY excited to see how tasty it is!  I think I’ll be having home made bread with my spaghetti dinner tonight!!

With love across the waters,