Home Made Bread

A week ago I discovered a great blog called lark&linen. It's a blog with a mix of interior design, food and little everyday life things...the sort of things that I like. As I was exploring the recipes list, I found one for bread that didn't need kneading. The author of that blog said that that recipe was so simple and easy, that she did it on a Friday evening after a few drinks. I had never made bread before, never had the guts, but after reading that statement I decided to try it.

The original post had a link to this video where you can see the explanation of the recipe, and you should check it out, but I'll write it here anyway, to make it easier. 

3 cups of flour (all purpose)

1/4 tea spoon of yeast

1 and 1/4 tea spoon salt

1 and  1/2 cups water 

Mix the flour, yeast and salt. Add the water and mix it all with your fingers and once you get a dough it's done. Cover the bowl and let it rest for at least 12h. 

Pre-heat the oven at 260.C (500.F) with the pot that you will use inside.

Remove the dough from the bowl and shape the bread. Then cover it all with sesame seeds or flour.

Place the bread in the hot pot and put it in the oven with a cover for 30 min. Then remove the cover and leave it for 15 min. more. Done!

Well now, my personal experience was...interesting... to say the least. Not because the recipe wasn't that simple, because it really was. But because anything that could have gone wrong went wrong. And I'm the only one to blame. The most amazing thing though, is that in the end I still had a delicious home made bread, just out of the oven, for breakfast. Allow me to show you just how idiot-proof this recipe is.

Last evening I grabbed my little piece of paper, where I had written the recipe down, and, filled with courage, started working on that bread. 

going wrong n.1

1 cup of flour, hmm... 2 cups of flour...erm... I don't have any more flour. Ok, ok, no stress... I'll make a third of the recipe instead. 

going wrong n.2

Then came the yeast. I couldn't find yeast in powder in the supermarket, only in a sort of a cube "thingy", so I didn't know very well how to measure it. I ended up using a little chunk of the thing with the size more or less of a 1/4 tea spoon.

going wrong n.3

I had no problems with the salt...haha. But then I got distracted and added more water than I was supposed to for a third of the recipe. 

I started mixing everything and it was like if I had gone back to my childhood. 

(As I felt that gooey dough on my fingers I remembered the times when me and my brother wanted to do some collages and there was no glue at home. My mother would then mix some flour and water and that worked perfectly fine as glue.) 

I decided to wait the 12h to see if any sort of miracle would happen. Then this morning I went back to the bowl and the goo was still very much a goo. But I can be as stubborn as a mule and so decided to carry on.

going wrong n.4

(well this actually ended up working perfectly fine)

Due to the already described texture of the dough I obviously couldn't shape it into a bread. But apart from that, I didn' have sesame seeds to cover it with, because I had decided to use flour...but now I also had no flour. And I didn't even think about that until that precise moment. So what to do, what to do?... Oats! I always have oats around, for my pancakes and to have with yoghurt. It worked great!

going wrong n.5

As if I hadn't done enough stupidities, I left it in the oven for 5 min longer than what was supposed, so some of the oats covering the bread got a bit "toasty". 

But the bread actually looked like a bread. So I decided to take some pictures. Then I put it back on the kitchen table and stared at it for a while. I thought: what the hell! It looks like bread... let's see if it tastes like bread. I cut a slice, it was still warm, I spread some butter and home made strawberry jam, took a deep breath and bit it. It was real, I had made bread and it tasted good! Ok it was a very small bread, but still...

I've been wearing a huge smile since then, all proud of myself for finally making my own bread...despite all the things that went wrong.