Monday, November 15, 2010

crisp day


a loaf of rosemary wheat bread. 

This is the second loaf of bread I've made recently, and it is delicious. I learned the hard way that convection ovens take less time to cook than what I'm used to. . . the last one was a bit charred. . . but still edible!

It's been a nice weekend across the pond. Besides our usual work, we went out on Saturday to do a bit of shopping, and we really lucked out with a beautifully crisp day. After all of the rain last week, most of the leaves have dropped from the trees, and coat the sidewalks yellow and orangey red.  

2 comments:

iselby said...

Yay, LinkWithin! Also, your rosemary bread looks delicious. Do you have a recipe? I want to try making bread.. and hopefully not failing.

LAUREN said...

Thanks! This bread is pretty simple to make, here's the recipe: 3 cups of all purpose flour (if you like wheat try 2 cups of all purpose and 1 cup of wheat), a quarter teaspoon of rapid rise or instant yeast, 1.5 teaspoons of table salt and 1.5 cups of warm water (it's important to make sure the water is quite warm, you don't want it scalding, that can kill the yeast, but it needs to be hot enough to get things started. you can use a meat thermometer to test the water temperature. i think it shouldn't be any hotter than 115 degrees.) So that's the basic recipe, if you want to try rosemary bread, I've been using dried herbs de provence, which actually has a bit of thyme, sage and maybe a few other herbs as well, but I find it to be quite tasty. I haven't tried fresh rosemary yet because I'm trying to give our plant some time to recover from all the trimming I've been doing, but I feel that fresh rosemary might offer a more poignant taste.
First whisk together the flour, yeast and salt (and herbs) together in a bowl. Next add the warm water. It will be a somewhat sticky and shaggy ball of dough. Cover the bowl with a towel or foil and let it sit to rise at room temperature for about 8 hours. It can sit up to 18 hours, if need be. Next transfer the dough to a floured surface for some kneading. This bread doesn't need much kneading, so just 10-15 times will do. The dough is going to be very sticky so it helps to flour your hands or coat them in olive oil. Form the dough into a round loaf and let it sit on a cookie sheet or pie pan lined with parchment paper that's been dusted with flour (so it doesn't stick so much). Let the dough rise another 2 hours. If you aren't going to bake it in 2 hours, you can put it in the fridge, but once removed it will need to rise for 3 hours. When preheating the oven (to 450 degrees F) put a dutch oven with its lid in to let it heat. As an aside, if you don't have a dutch oven, use something that is pretty thick, some type of stoneware should do very well. After about a half hour, remove the empty dutch oven from the oven and pick up the dough by the parchment paper placing it into the dutch oven. Cut a few slits in the top to the dough if you'd like. Place the cover on the pot and return pot to the oven. Bake for 30 minutes, and remove the lid. Then bake for another 15-25 minutes. Depending on your oven you may want to leave the cover, or foil over the bread as the crust may brown a little too much. Once finished baking transfer to a cooling rack.

Let me know if you have any questions!