The Illustrated Kitchen Bread

I'm chained to my laptop this weekend to finish various projects, so I thought a really good way to procrastinate getting any of those projects actually finished would be to make bread and take some shitty cell phone pictures of it for you.

You're welcome.   And thank you for enabling my distraction from important shit.

This is my effort to prove to you that your kitchen holds as yet untold and unimaginable varieties of bread lurking in your cupboards and fridge, waiting to be brought forth into the world.   Spelunk your cupboards.  

Let's make a variation of the very first bread I posted, which was made with infused oil.    

I don't have any infused oil.  This will not stop me. This is what I have:

Basil and young garlic from this week's farm share, and olive oil.   So I did this:

That's the white part of the young garlic chopped and added to 1/4 cup of the oil.   I heated this in the microwave for one minute, and set it aside while I got the packet of yeast going in 1 tbl. sugar and 1/2 cup warm water.   Here's what I mean about blooming your yeast.

Sad Beige Clumps.

 

Eight minutes later:  foamy and bubbly! 

Now to decide what else to use.   I'm going to roughly double a loaf recipe, so in theory, we need two cups of liquid, and about 6 cups of flour.  I could just use water.  But I'm not, because that is not the point of this post.   To the refrigerator!

I have some farm share eggs, some half and half I won't use up on coffee before it goes bad, a can of black olives and part of a jar of green.   I'm definitely going to use an egg and some half and half- this will make a really tender loaf; egg always helps smooth a dough and hold it together, so because I'm flying by the seat of my pants, I'm going to use one.   Also, don't forget the basil!  Or forget it, I don't care, I don't judge.  Here's what it looks like before I mixed it-  1 cup and a splash of half and half, 1 egg, 1/4 cup oil, basil, 1/2 cup warm water, and about 1/3 cup of the olive brine.  It adds up to roughly 2 cups of liquid.

I added the olive brine for funsies.  And it replaces the 1 tsp salt per loaf, natch.

And mixed:

Now, get a sturdy spatula or spoon, and start adding flour.   Because there is no rhyme in my reason today, I started with a heaping cup of bread flour, and one of whole wheat.  I wish I hadn't added the whole wheat, just because I think the finished bread dough texture would have photographed better, but whatever.  I did it out of guilt over the half and half.

Here it is at the point of no return on adding shit to the dough.  At this point, I thought the brineless olives looked lonely in their jar, so I chopped them up and threw them in, because I CAN.  You don't have to put anything in.  I'm making a point today.

 Now it's too stiff to stir, so I turned it out on my counter to knead in the last of the flour.  Remember how this was supposed to take about 6 cups of flour?  It didn't.  It took 5, and some additional flour I sprinkled on the work surface.   Why is this?  I don't know. It's humid today and it's heavier than usual?  Because Americans measure by volume and not by weight, and that's stupid?  I'm not going to worry about it, and you shouldn't either, because after a couple minutes, it looked like this:

They will try and tell you this takes a certain amount of time of kneading.  Knead for 7 minutes, they will say.  They lie.  It takes as long as it takes.  This time, it probably took 3 solid minutes, from start to finish. It helps that you did a lot of the work with a spoon first.

You know it's good to go when the folds and seams you make by kneading it and turning into a ball easily disappear.  If you pinch it together and the seams don't go away, your dough isn't elastic enough, and you probably need more moisture.   Sprinkle a tablespoon of water on it at a time and keep kneading.   This is perfect.  It would be easier to tell without the whole wheat coloration.

Here it is, oiled up and back in the bowl where it started.  Cover it with a kitchen towel, and set a timer for an hour fifteen... and ta da!

See?  It's nicely doubled, and in the picture on the right, I've dumped it out on the work surface so you can see the holes the yeast critters have pitted the dough with.   It's super soft and silky.  Now beat it up again!  You want to break up all the air bubbles so your final loaf bakes without air pockets.

Boule!

 This messy collage is meant to illustrate the birth of loaves.   I made a boule and also a small loaf, so you can clearly see how they are both....big lumps of bread dough.  

And there they are, up close, with egg wash on them.   This is one small egg, beaten and brushed on the loaves BEFORE they raise for the final time.

Cover them back up, and set your timer for a half hour.
...
Oh, hey, here's a helpful tip that is worth continuing to read this epic post: you'll notice the round one has been slashed for fancy, and the loaf is properly and evenly patted into a VERY
GREASED loaf pan.

Get the corners of the loaf pan like your life depends on it; you'll avoid tears later.  With bread, it's not about the investment of labor- it's not that hard.  It's the two hours of rising time that makes you throw things and cry when your loaf sticks to the pan.  It sucks.  To quote a great American: "Butter yo' shit."

Okay, so after a half hour, I wandered in and turn my oven to 375.  By the time it preheated, the loaves looked like this:

If they don't, wait another 15-20 minutes.  Yeast is a living thing.  Sometimes it's nearly as lazy as I am.

These baked for about 35 minutes.   You may need more, you may need less.

This is the color you want.

One more tip before I bounce.  If you're making a round loaf, wipe the last of the infused oil out of the ramekin with a paper towel and use it to grease the bottom of the pan.   You'll get the flavor, and the extra browning.

You can totally do this.

And it tastes really, really good.   Here's a still warm slice, so you can see how the texture is perfect.

All of those flavors combined to make a really savory bread without a single taste dominating.

I'm telling you, you can't really fuck this up after you get the basics down.