Welcome back!

We are so happy to finally be back.  It turns out the the holidays (and all the aftermath) can be a little exhausting, overwhelming, and busy.  That being said, we are happy to be starting these posts back up.  It's the middle of February, which in Montreal-speak means we're all bundled up inside our apartments afraid of the bitter-cold outdoors.  In other words, there is no better time to cook and write about cooking.  

Basil and I decided to kick-off 2014 with a bread post.  Why?  Well, I'm not quite sure we even know the answer to that one.  When Basil sent me the bread recipe for this post, she prefaced it by saying that she didn't quite know where to start. "It's hard not to be overwhelmed with all the things I could say about bread!!" she wrote.  And of course, she is right!  Bread is amazing.  End of story. 

Despite all the hype about going gluten-free, bread still plays an important roll in our diets.  (So maybe Basil and I like to say this because we want to justify how much bread we eat on a daily basis.)  We eat bread for breakfast as toast; for lunch we have sandwiches; and who doesn’t love a good dinner roll.  

In Germany, bread makes up such an important part of their cuisine that it is usually eaten morning, noon, and night.  Germany produces more varieties of breads than any other country: over 300 varieties of breads and over 1200 varieties of rolls or mini-breads, brötchen, (I'm taking a German class now so I figured I'd show off a little.) 

South Lower Saxony is home to the European Bread Museum of Ebergoetzen 

But bread is more than a national or cultural object.  Bread is perhaps the most universally eaten thing (the academic in me cringes as I write this because I have no empirical proof to back that statement up.)  But I do know this: bread is eaten all over the world: Japanese anpan sweat buns, Venezuelan arepa, Indian naan and chapati, Jewish challah, Italina ciabatta and foccacia, French bagette and brioche. The list goes on.

Bread might be our favourite food.  Nothing makes your house smell better than a freshly baked loaf fresh out of the oven. On a cold winters day there’s almost nothing we want more than a hot cup of tea and thick slice of homemade bread with butter. 

I suppose your all thinking that I should just stop talking about bread now and let you read the recipe.  Well I suppose I could do that.  Without further ado, here it its! 

Happy cooking, 

Lavender

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Rustic No-Knead Bread

This bread is so beautiful I want to spend the rest of my life taking pictures of it and then scrapbooking the pictures in a scrapbook made from THIS BREAD!!!

The Night Before

This recipe is floating around the Internet these days and it leaves a lot of room for creative experimentation! All it takes to pull off is the foresight to mix the ingredients the night before you actually want to eat it.

The night before, in a large bowl, combine:

The flour

• 3 cups flour (1/2-1 cup of which can be whole wheat or spelt, etc.)  Currently I use 2 1/2 cups white flour, 1/2 dark rye and 1/4 flax seeds and I'm addicted.
• 1-2 tsps salt.  The first time I made this I only used 1 and this second time round I used 2 but it seems a bit overly salty so I'll probably do 1 and a bit the next time.
• I also added 1/2 cup sesame seeds because I've still got a ton of from when I made bagels. You could also use flax seeds. So this is going to be a seedy bread. Yum Yum Yum.

The yeast: 

You can either use 1/4 teaspoon Instant Yeast and just throw it in with the dry ingredients. Or, you can pre-proof 1/2 teaspoon regular yeast in a cup warm water with a dollop of honey or maple syrup (that's what I do but it's your choice.)  If you choose to use regular yeast, just subtract the ¼ cup warm water will come out of your total amount of water.

The water: 

Add 1 1/2 cups warm water and stir with a fork until combined. I ended up adding an extra scant 1/4 cup of water because the sesame seeds changed the wet/dry ratio a bit. Done. Cover and go bed.

Finish tomorrow.

The Next Day

To bake the bread you prepped last night turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and wet your hands a bit so the dough doesn't stick to them. Pull the edges up and push them gently into the centre to make a kind of belly-button on the top of the bread. It really doesn't need to be kneaded.

Then gently put the whole thing in a clean dish towel sprinkled with flour, cornmeal or oats and tuck it in for another 1-2 hours of rising. (I had some quick oats in my cupboard and the recipe called for a cornmeal coating to keep it from sticking to the pan. I used the cornmeal on round one of this bread but thought I'd switch it up and it worked so so well!!)

shhhhhhh the bread’s sleeping!

With me so far? The bread rose over night and all day (so 9pm-4pm.) Then I belly-buttoned it and tossed it in oats. One more rise to go.  Just 2 more hours before you have a fresh loaf of bread!

When your bread is almost ready (about half an hour left to go in the last rise) put an oven-proof pot with a lid in the oven and preheat the pot and oven to 425 degrees (my oven is a bit hot so I'll probably only go as high as 400 next time).

Bake it for 20 minutes covered and then 15 minutes uncovered. It should make a hollow sound when you flick it.

Bon appétit, 

Basil