Baking bread sounds simple - the staple of life, right? Even though I enjoy baking cakes and cookies - successful bread baking has always eluded me. In my many blog travels I stumbled on a book entitled, "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day". The pictures were beautiful and I thought "why not give it a try". I should digress to explain that I absolutely love bread - white bread, rye bread, squaw bread , challah bread, wheat bread and rolls, popovers, biscuits, muffins - you name it. The explanations seemed easy enough and since I don't like fear to dictate my life I had to give it a try. Of course I first had to enlist the help of my sister C. - We carefully measured out our ingredients and checked the temperature for the water as not to "kill" our yeast - mixed our dough per instructions - then we served ourselves margaritas and waited to see it our dough rise.
And - it did - rise that is. The technique for the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is to make a large batch of a wet sticky dough, store it in the refrigerator and pull out enough to make a loaf as needed. Our first try certainly looked good and the smell of warm, yeasty aromas coming from the oven was certainly irresistable - we couldn't wait to try it. Because we are at a higher elevation (4400') we also have to adjust baking times and temperatures whenever we bake.
My two loaves actually morphed together as you can see. I'm still working on the temperatures - they were slightly uncooked inside. The texture was good - and after toasting - butter and jam, it tasted good.
If you feel the urge to try baking bread - here is the link that got us started: http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/
I just tried making their wheat bread recipe and it didn't turn out well at all. Not sure what I did wrong. I was really hoping it was going to work. The inside was very doughy in mine too. And it had a very yeasty flavor. I have a few more loaves to make so hopefully I can improve it some how.
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