Artisan Bread

First task of my 2011 goals completed and I'm really annoyed that I wasted my time with it.  It probably didn't help that I was in a bad mood yesterday...but let's just pretend it was just a dumb project. 

I had heard on a few blogs about this wonderful book called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, then saw that the authors wrote another one entitled Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  I looked through this and thought it sounded like an easy project.  The premise of the book is that you can create a large batch of dough with no need to proof the yeast or knead it.  The dough sits in the fridge for up to 2 weeks and you can use it as needed.  It also reminded me of my great-grandfather's recipe for refridgerator rolls since you can also store the dough in the fridge.  Plus, homemade bread in 5 minutes sounds great, right? 

Yeah, well.  It's deceiving.  It's not really 5 minutes a day.  Yes, it takes 5 minutes to mix up the dough which is much more moise than regular bread dough.  The recipe will actually make 4 loaves of bread, so I only made up a half batch.  I didn't really want to get stuck with an enormous amount of dough if I didn't like it.  Boy, am I glad I did that.  The dough sat in the fridge for about 5 days before I pulled it out for the next step.  The next step is to shape it into a free form loaf and allow it to "rise" on the counter for about 90 minutes.  However, the instructions (which, incidentally, are about 10 pages long) say that it might not rise much, just spread out sideways.  Once it "rises", you brush the top with water and stick it in a 450 degree oven with a shallow pan of water to steam cook it.  Apparently, the steam is supposed to create a crusty outside.  That is the only part of this recipe that worked for me.  Otherwise, this is what it looked like.

Not too bad, right?  Wrong.  It's only about 1 inch thick.  It did not get the "oven spring" the cookbook kept saying it would get.  Maybe there was something wrong with my yeast, I don't know.  What I do know is that this felt like a gimmick to me.  I could have made bread in my stand mixer that WOULD have risen and it would have taken the same amount of time.  And that would have included the time to knead it since the mixer does it for you.  I don't know that much about bread, but I feel like I could free form a regular bread recipe and steam bake it without all the rigamarole. 

Plus, we just had new smoke detectors installed and despite the fact that NOTHING WAS BURNING, all four of them went off multiple times.  During naptime.  Very annoying.  At some point in the baking process while I was watching my bread NOT get oven spring, Ethan snuck into the pantry, climbed up on a stool and ate a whole handful of tree nut/coconut laden granola, which led to me freaking out and lecturing him about how he can't eat anything without asking Mommy and him asking me to "forgive him" (slay me now, I'm a terrible mother).  Yeah, you know, maybe I was just in a bad mood. 

In other cooking news, the roasted chick peas that I made came out beautifully. 

 

The boys loved them.  Noah loved them so much he pushed an empty box over to the counter so he could sneak them. 

Next task, please?