Weekly bread

We had a little brunch with friends on Sunday morning, and I have to say the toast we made was really not up to par. It was a loaf of supermarket French bread, and I'm sure it was just fine, but yeesh, it was so ... soft and ... soft.

I started baking bread last fall from my Aunt Cheri's recipe for Aunt Lisa's bread. Aunt Lisa is really, truly Italian, came to Indiana from the mother country as a bride, and she makes the best bread, entirely, it seems, by look and feel. Nothing so fussy as measuring ingredients is involved, so Aunt Cheri sort of tamed the process for us simple American girls who are married to our measuring cups.

I'm a complete hack, but except for the one week where I radically decreased the amount of salt, this recipe works. It requires nothing complicated, just a warm room, and a few hours at home. The bread is crusty outside, toothy within, and as much as I love it soaking up sauce or soup or bright yellow egg yolks, it makes ridiculously good toast. And grilled cheese sandwiches. I'm starting to salivate just a little here...

Here's what you do:

Stir together, in a very big bowl,
7 1/2 cups flour
4 teaspoons salt
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast (one packet),

then add
3 1/2 cups of warm water (I have no idea precisely how hot the water is--it's not blistering, but it feels pleasantly hot).

Stir it until you can't see any more flour. Cover it with a tea towel and a bath towel (this is the only part where I think maybe Aunt Cheri is pulling my leg, but I keep a bath towel in my rising spot now), and put it in a warm place (about 75 degrees) for 3 1/2 hours.

Give it a good stir so that it sinks back down in the bowl. This is a pretty wet dough, and it's going to look weird, not all puffed and dry and full of potential like other bread you've tried. It's going to look sticky. Cover it up again and let it sit for another 1 1/2 hours.

Spray a couple of largish circles of non-stick cooking spray on a 12 x 18 cookie sheet. Heavily flour your countertop (I use a big flexible plastic sheet that's meant for rolling pie crust--it makes the cleanup ever so much simpler when you don't have to scrape dough off the counter), and scrape the bread dough out onto the flour. Divide in into two roughly equal pieces with a big knife, and knead each one lightly.

Like I said, this is a wet dough. It is supremely sticky. It will drink up plenty more flour. I do not knead it for long. I knead each piece for about a minute. Like I said, I'm a complete hack, and maybe my Aunt Cheri will say I need to knead for way longer, and I'm completely of two minds on whether I can see Aunt Lisa kneading for one minute or ten minutes, but whatever, it's working with this tiny amount of kneading, so I'm just kind of going with it. I knead each piece a little, adding enough flour that I can touch it without it swallowing my hand--it's like The Blob--and then I quickly pull the edges around and under so that it makes an amoeba-like ball, and drop it onto one of the sprayed circles on the baking sheet. Then I do the other one.

Once they're both on the sheet, put the tea towel over them to rest for 30 minutes, and preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

After the 30 minute rest, take off the towel and notice that the loaves are probably touching each other. This is totally fine. Put the sheet in the oven and set the timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees and bake for another 50 minutes. Cool the breads on a rack. They'll break apart from each other quite easily.

Dip like crazy at dinner, and toast it up all week long.
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Now that I've written all that out, it's totally obvious to me that I need to do some serious experimenting here. Next weekend, after I pick up another 50-pound bag of flour, I'm going to make four loaves, two this way, and two with a lot more kneading. Also, I've ordered a kitchen scale, and I'm going to gather a little data about the amount of flour I'm starting with. Surely a weight would be a great deal more precise than the measuring-cup method. And now I'm wondering if I make this bread every weekend for 20 years or so, if I won't just get to a place where I don't need to measure anything, I just add the flour until it looks right...?   

Comments

[Donna]

Thanks for the recipe! I haven't made bread where you let it rise before kneading, I'd like to try this technique.

What do you use for your "warm place"? I used to use the oven when we had a gas one, the pilot light made it just warm enough. But now we have an electric one.

[whitney]

Ooh, I will have to give this a try! I am getting into breadmaking recently, but have yet to bake a bread that would work well for soup-dipping (mostly I've been making really dense whole-grain breads, which I love, but they're too sweet/nutty to go well with the soups we make).

[h]

Okay. I have had this bread. As toast. Delicious, yummy, is it rude to ask for more toast.

It is divine! As in, so divine that I didn't even ask for the recipe because I was sure something so delicious was way, way beyond my basic, yeast phobic, quickbread baking realm.

Now that I see the recipe, I think maybe I should give it whirl. If Chrysanthemum can inspire me to make my own bread, a sweater can't be far behind... But, I'll start with the bread, only one miracle at a time. Now I just have to find a place that is 75 degrees in my frostbitten house...

[Julie]

Good for you for making your own bread! I went through a phase this summer when I was doing this, then stopped. I think I need to get back to it...

[Sonya]

Delicious! I am going to have to give this recipe to Mr. Knitsonya, he is the bread baker in our house. I specialize in making brick-like loaves.

[Natasha]

oh that looks yummy- i am completly addicted to the 'Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day' by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe

It makes up the same wet dough

[Lynn]

My dear, where oh where is your "subscribe" button?

And no, frickin' so did not exist in WWII. Unless it was hidden in puffy loaves or bread.