Artisan Bread

You might want to skip down to the next paragraph so you don’t have to listen to (read) my whining.  Sometimes cooking is just … well it’s just a pain.  Don’t get me wrong, I love to bake.  And this bread turned out great, and easy.  Bonus!  But I seem to get in a rut sometimes and hit several not-so-great recipes in a row.  For instance, I made shrimp scampi for the first time.  It didn’t turn out quite like I expected.  I think I overcooked it a bit and had way too much pasta in the bowl so the sauce became non-existent.  I served it with this bread however, so that was a plus.  It wasn’t bad, just not blog worthy… yet.  Then I made a crock-pot barbecue chicken recipe that turned out just so-so.  My husband’s thinks it tastes fine.  But ‘fine’ is just not good enough to blog.  And to make it all worse, all the photos turned out less than desirable.  So I have another recipe I’ll be making tonight for a birthday breakfast.  Keep your fingers crossed for me – I need a home run!

This is it.  Bread flour, yeast, salt and water.

Mix the flour, yeast and salt together.

Add room temperature water.

Mix until blended.  Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and a lid if you have it.   Leave the dough to rest at room temperature for at least 12 hours.  No typo – overnight is great.  I allowed the dough to sit for about 18 hours.

The dough will become bubbly and look very thin.  I kept wondering if it was really turning out OK.

When ready to bake, pour the dough out onto a floured surface.  Sprinkle with additional flour and stretch the dough upward and fold it over a few times.  Be careful not to overwork the dough.

Flour your hands and cut the dough in half.

Form two or four small loaves.

Place the oblong free-form shapes on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.  Sprinkle with flour and cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 30 minutes.

While the dough is rising, preheat the oven to 475 degrees.  A few minutes before putting the loaves in the oven, put a pie pan filled with 1 inch of water on the bottom rack.  The water creates steam which acts as a ‘turbo boost’ for the bread and gives it a great crust.

Bake the bread on the middle rack until it is a fine nutty brown color.  This took about 20 minutes.

Allow the bread to cool on a wire rack before serving.  Apparently this tastes better cooled.

It was really good, light and not at all dense.  We served it with the scampi and then the rest was made into ham and cheese Paninis on Mother’s Day for some of our visitors.  This was just so easy and delicious!  A couple of times I thought it wasn’t going to work, but it did.  This was posted on Tasty Kitchen and right now it has 17 reviews, all perfect.  I figured it must be good to get that many 5 mitts!

Have a great Wednesday and thanks so much for stopping by!