Flour Tortillas

I've been trying to do most, if not all of my cooking at home lately and on a budget. I typically feed 3 adults and 2 kids dinner for $5-$8. $10 dinners has nothing on me! I try to make sure my dinners are at least semi healthy also. I mean a person could feed a family of five Ramen noodles for dinner for under $1 but that wouldn't be very healthy! I also use my crock-pot a LOT since it means dinner is pretty much ready and waiting when I get home from work. Last night I made a Mexican chicken and beans in the crock-pot, it's sort of like an enchilada filling yum!

Crockpot Chicken with Black Beans and Cream Cheese:

Ingredients
2-3 boneless chicken breasts (mine are still frozen)
1 (15 1/2 ounce) can black beans
1 15 oz can diced tomatoes (or 1 large fresh tomato diced)
1/2 cup water
1 packet taco seasoning
1 (15 ounce) can corn
1/2 package cream cheese (most cream cheese comes in 8 oz bricks, you want to use 4 oz)

Directions
-Put frozen, yes, frozen, boneless chicken breasts into crock pot.
-Add 1 packet of taco seasoning, 1 can of black beans drained, 1 can of corn drained, 1 can diced tomatoes (or your fresh diced tomato) and 1/2 cup water
-Cook in crock pot on high for 4-5 hours or on low for 8-9 hours
-Break up the chicken, it basically falls apart into shredded chicken if you just poke at it with a spoon a bit
-Add 1/2 package cream cheese (just throw it on top!) and let sit for about 1/2 hour
- Stir it up and serve over rice or with tortilla chips or better yet with home made flour tortillas!


And so we get to the "bread baking" part of this post. I wanted to serve my Chicken and Black beans with flour tortillas, I was going to the grocery store so I could have picked up a package but I thought, hey I bet they aren't that hard to make; so I looked up some recipes and you know, they aren't hard to make at all!

I got this recipe from allrecipes.com submitted by LaDonna

Flour Tortillas

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons lard
1 1/2 cups water

Directions

-Whisk the flour, salt, and baking powder together in a mixing bowl. Mix in the lard with your fingers until the flour resembles cornmeal. Add the water and mix until the dough comes together; place on a lightly floured surface and knead a few minutes until smooth and elastic. Divide the dough into 24 equal pieces and roll each piece into a ball.

-Preheat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Use a well-floured rolling pin to roll a dough ball into a thin, round tortilla. Place into the hot skillet, and cook until bubbly and golden; flip and continue cooking until golden on the other side. Place the cooked tortilla in a tortilla warmer; continue rolling and cooking the remaining dough.

It took a little time but it was pretty easy. I think cooking them until they are "golden" is not a great idea because they get kind of crispy which wasn't what I was looking for. My second time around I cooked them covered and on a lower heat and I was happier with the result. I did use lard because I happened to pass right by it in the grocery store but from the reviews I read you can totally sub in shortening. Then you won't have a package of lard hanging around your house. I need to hide it somewhere I hate opening up my cabinet and seeing it there, it just feels wrong! Anyhow the tortillas are great and I will totally be making these again.

My perfect bread

I have been baking but haven't done much posting since all my bread seems to be coming out pretty much the same every time, and not all that great. Until the other night, when it came out absolutly perfect, and then I was able to recreate my success. So I have finally a recipe that works for me, and for my schedule. I make the dough late at night, leave it covered overnight in my cold kitchen (50-60 degrees) perform the 2nd mix in the morning before work, leave it covered in the fridge until I get home form work. When I get home at 5:30 I take it out and place it near my pellet stove for 2 hours, then I shape it, let it rise and bake bread at 10 at night! This recipe makes two medium size bread loaves.

Ingredients

¾ cup of a starter

1 tsp dry active yeast

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups bread flour

1 cup warm water (plus possibly a few more tablespoons)

3 tbsp olive oil (plus 2 more tbsp. for the outside before baking)

1 & 1/2 tbsp kosher salt

Directions-

Step 1- Make the dough

Combine the starter, 1 cup warm water, 1 tsp yeast, 2 tbsp olive oil and 2 cups of bread flour, mix in a Kitchen Aid (KA) mixer with a dough hook on low speed and slowly add in the 2 cups of all-purpose flour. Increase your mixer speed to medium and let it continue to run and watch to see if dough is forming into one large clump or if it is still staying crumbly and in pieces. If it hasn't come together begin adding 1 tbsp of water at a time and letting the mixer run a bit after each addition. When the dough comes together you have added enough water. Now add the 1 & 1/2 tbsp kosher salt to the dough, continue running the mixer for 8 minutes. Remove the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Rise in a warm place for 3 hours or in a cool place overnight. Your dough should triple in bulk.

Step 2- 2^nd mix

Put your risen dough back to mix on your KA mixer fitted with a dough hook. (I let mine rise right in the mixing bowl and then do this stage still in the same bowl) Mix your dough for 5 minutes. It will return to it's original small size since you are letting out of it (that's okay it's supposed to) Remove the bowl and cover again to let rise for 3 hours in a warm place. Alternately you can refrigerate it now and then take it out of the refrigerator and let it sit in a warm place for 2 hours. Ultimately you are looking for it to rise back to about 3 times its deflated size.

Step 3- shape and rise

Turn your risen dough out onto a floured work surface, fold and stretch your dough onto itself 4 or 5 times before cutting in half and shaping into loafs. Place on a floured cutting board and cover with oiled plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm place for 1 ½-2 ½ hours, no longer! Any longer and your bread will be overproofed, it results in really disappointing bread!

Step 4- bake

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees F. Transfer your bread to a corn meal dusted peel or easy to maneuver cutting board. Rub each of your loaves with a tbps of olive oil (don't try to oil the bottoms just tops and sides) Slash the tops of your loaves with a razor blade. Steam your oven. (Skip this step if you have an oven with electronic/digital controls, you could ruin it) Slide your loaves into the oven. Bake at 500 degrees for 8 minutes, then reduce temperature to 400 degrees F and bake an additional 8 minutes. Remove loafs and let cool on a wire rack. Try not to cut into it until it is cool. Pretty much an impossible feat one you smell this bread baking! Here is what mine look like

Crunchy and crusty on the outside, soft and filled with big stretchy holes on the inside. I ate one whole loaf by myself, toasted with butter. This is NOT good for Weight Watchers!

In some of my posts coming up I will talk about how to make different kinds of starters, how to steam an oven, and how to slash your loafs.

Julia’s White Bread

I was looking for a nice easy bread to try and I came across Julia Child's recipe for White bread. I LOVE my Baking with Julia cookbook so I figured this had to be good. Here is the recipe

2 1/8 cups water

2 tsp active dry yeast

2 tsp sugar

6 cups bread flour or all-purpose flour

2 tsp salt

¼ cup unsalted butter softened

1 Pour 1/2 cup of the water into a bowl and mix with yeast and sugar til foamy.

2 Let sit for 5 minutes until creamy.

3 Put the yeast mixture, rest of the water and 3 cups of the flour into the mixer with the dough hook.

4 Mix slowly until blended then add the rest of the flour.

5 Increase speed and scrape down the sides until the dough comes together.

6 (If it doesn't add a tbsp of flour at a time until it does.) Add salt and mix at medium speed for 10 minutes (or do half in mixer and half kneading) until dough is smooth and elastic.

7 Back in mixer add butter 1 tbsp at a time (dough may come apart, but mixing will pull it back together).

8 Turn dough out on lightly floured surface and shape it into a ball then place in a large buttered or oiled bowl.

9 Turn dough so it is completely coated in the fat, then cover in plastic for 45 minutes to an hour, until it has doubled in size at room temperature.

10 Butter 2 loaf pans.

11 Deflate the dough, cut in half and turn out onto a lightly floured surface.

12 Roll out into a 9 x 12-inch rectangle.

13 With the short end facing you, fold the dough into thirds like a sheet of paper to go into an envelope, creating a roll.

14 Pinch the seam closed, and pinch the ends enough so it will fit in the loaf pan.

15 Drop in the loaf pan seam side down, and repeat.

16 Cover the loaves with buttered plastic wrap and allow to rise again in a warm place (80°F) for 45 minutes, until they double in size.

17 Preheat the oven to 375°F and put the rack in the center of the oven.

18 Bake for 35-45 minutes until they are honey brown.

19 Immediately turn out of pans onto a rack to cool.

20 Once almost completely cool, they can be cut.

21 Store in a brown paper bag for a day or two.

22 Once cut, turn cut side down onto a cutting board and cover with a kitchen towel.

I followed the recipe to the letter with one exception. I never have unsalted butter in my house so I used salted butter and cut the amount of salt I added to the recipe in half.

I really enjoyed working with this bread dough, I was just imagining how great it would taste especially with butter in it! It rose beautifully and baked into a rather pretty loaf. I knew this would just be a standard white bread loaf so no expectations for anything "artisan" like. But still even with fairly low expectations I found this bread really lacking. It didn't taste like anything. Maybe it needed more salt, maybe I'm not used to a loaf that due to its quick rising times doesn't have time to really develop much flavor. I also didn't like the effect the rolling out and folding of the dough had on the final product. The inside was made up of a spiral of bread. When you cut it the darn thing unraveled. White bread is supposed to be great for sandwiches and toast. I couldn't successfully use it for either of those things! I think I will try some variation of this again but I wouldn't roll it out and I would definitely use more salt. Julia, I'm disappointed!

Little hands make awesome bread

I pulled out my bread machine the other day because I like it for making pizza dough. I saved a piece of Friday night's pizza dough and later in the evening used it to start a bread dough in my bread machine. I went the starter route mixing the dough with only warm water and flour. The next morning I used that starter which had sat out overnight to make the final dough using ¾ cup warm water, 3 cups flour, 1 tbsp kosher salt, 2 tsp yeast, 1 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp olive oil. I let it go the whole dough cycle in the bread machine and then transferred it to a bowl to rise another hour. Then Lily helped me stretch and fold it.

We let it rise in a warm place for 2 hours before shaping the dough. The loaves then rose another 2 hours before I steamed the oven and baked the loaves at 500 degrees.

It came out AWESOME! So yummy. The next day the crust was like leather but on the day it was baked it was wonderful! I need to remember to use my bread machine more often!

Sorta Sourdough

I've been trying to develop a sourdough starter, I used a cheat method and put a tiny bit of yeast in the starter and I think that made my sourdough develop really quickly, maybe too quickly and I missed its prime or didn't feed it enough. Not sure what exactally the problem was but this sourdough was so dense that it wasn't edible. I used the recipe I linked here. I used 2 cups of my sourdough starter plus 1/2 cup water, 3 cups flour, 1 tbsp kosher salt, 1 tbsp sugar and 2 tbsp olive oil. I let it rise twice each time for about 4 hours but it didn't rise that much. The directions that I linked to (The John Ross directions) didn't really say much about rising times. The dough was rather wet so I baked it in loaf pans. I think 1st my sourdough starter wasn't active enough and second I didn't let the dough rise enough. Heres the end result.

It wasn't edible. Oh well better luck next time. I have a new starter going that I did not add yeast to, I'm hoping it develops better.

What do you do when you have too much zucchini? You make bread with it of course. I found this recipe for zucchini bread in one of my cookbooks and I made it. It came out sooo good. My kids even like it. It's a sweet quick bread, not a "real" bread like I've been making. But I am working on a sourdough too, those take a while to develop so in the meantime here's a really great zucchini bread recipe!



1 1/2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 cup vegtable oil

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1 tsp kosher salt

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

2 cups grated zucchini

1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans (toasted ones are even yummier)

1 tbsp vanilla extract



Mix sugar, eggs & oil, beat with mixer until thick and lemon color, add flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon, beat until combined. Add zucchini, nuts and vanilla; mix until combined. Split into two greased loaf pans. Bake in 350 degree oven for 1 hour. Let cool before trying to remove from the pan.








I used walnuts in my bread but I'm lazy so I didn't toast my nuts, I bet the bread would have been even better if I did. You totally can't taste any zucchini in the bread. It is so wonderful for breakfast with a cup of tea, or for a nice late night snack with a cup of tea. I love tea and I love this zucchini bread. Try it with one of the zucchini your neighbor pawns off on you!

Boring old white bread

You sick of hearing about my bread yet? Well I wasn't tired of baking it. It was Sunday and I had one tiny little loaf left from the previous day. I need more bread. I had taken a piece of dough from the last bread and cultivated it in pretty much the same way I had my last batch of starter. Sunday morning when I opened it up to use it, gone was that nice full yeasty beerlike smell I usually get from my starter, and in its place was the smell of sour milk. Is that how sourdough starter is supposed to smell? I didn't think so, so down the drain it went. I was going to have to make a strait up bread dough, no starter. As a side note I need to follow the directions in the sourdough article I linked to and actually cultivate a real sourdough starter so I know what it is supposed to be like, maybe it is supposed to smell like sour milk. What do I know?!!

I based this dough on yesterdays dough, the ingredients were:

1 cup water

3 cups bread flour (need the extra gluten from a bread flour since there is no starter)

1 1/2 tsp yeast

2 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp sugar

1tbsp olive oil

I mixed it up in the kitchen aid, it was really crumbly so I let it sit 10 minutes for the flour to absorb the water and then turned on the KA. Still crumbly, so I added 3 tbsp of water, one at a time until the dough came together. I left it mixing about 5 minutes then transferred it to a bowl to rise. Today is Sunday, you know what Sunday is? The kids say "church day" and they're right, but it's also SOCCER DAY!!! I'm getting pretty sick of soccer! While I was at the soccer field from 11:30 to 3:30 (I must admit it was a gorgeous day to be outside!) my bread was rising. We had a Birthday party to go to after soccer so while the kids changed their clothes I put the dough back into the KA with the dough hook and let it ride for 5 minutes before plopping it back in the bowl and covering it. Back from the party (2 and a half hours had passed) I punched down the dough, folded it over 3 or 4 times and shaped it. This time I only made it into two loafs so they wouldn't be so small. I covered them, left them near the warm pellet stove and went about the business of bathing children and putting away laundry, agh the glamorous life of a mom! In the evening after the kids were tucked in I cranked the oven to 500 degrees and baked my bread. I was really happy with how it came out.

This is a basic white bread, nothing fancy but it was very similar to my "Soccer Day Bread" and very similar to the bread from the day before. I think that all my starters are doing is allowing me to use all purpose flour instead of bread flour but the taste and texture isn't really changed.

Bread from Sourdoughish starter

I had two bakes this weekend neither complicated but both successful, so I'm happy.

I had a piece of dough saved from my boomerang bread debacle, even though the bread turned out terrible the dough was not at fault so after reading this great Sourdough Bread baking article http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm I had begun a bit of a sourdough starter. I never do anything by the book which is one of the reasons some of my breads don't turn out so well. Again I strayed from the 'baking rules'. First of all when you make sourdough you don't start with a piece of old dough. You just start with flour and water. But I'm used to the poolish method so I thought I'd combine the two methods and make a sourdough poolish? Also when you feed a sourdough you're supposed to take half of the starter out and throw it away. I don't like throwing stuff away so I just added to it leaving everything in there. I did this for 3 days figuring I would just keep building it up and use it when I needed it. So Friday evening with not much going on in the house I decided to start up a batch of bread dough. I based the dough on the recipe from the sourdough website that I linked above. It calls for 2 cups starter, 3 cups flour, 2 tbsp olive oil, 4 tsp sugar, 2 tsp of salt. When I measured out my starter I only had 1 1/2 cups so I reduced all the other ingredients accordinglyish, you know, because I never do anything by the book. I ended up using

1 1/2 cups starter

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tbsp sugar

1/2 tbsp kosher salt

1 tbsp x virgin olive oil

and then because the dough was just too dry to come together as it bounced around in the bowl of my Kitchen Aid I added 3 tbsp of water (1 at a time until the dough came together). If you read that sourdough baking link you will see that the author mentions that flour varies in absorbency and starters vary in wetness so I found it isn't against the rules to add more water or more or less flour depending on the look and feel of your dough. It actually means you're an experienced baker, so go me! Pleased with my dough I plopped it into a large plastic Tupperware bowl, covered it and left it on the kitchen table for an hour. I was ready for bed (it was 11pm) so I decided to give the bread another ride in the KA, back in it went and it spent 3 minutes rolling around on the dough hook and trying to escape out of the top of the bowl. I put it back in the Tupperware, covered it and let it rise overnight on the kitchen table. At 8am the next morning I had my hands back in the dough. The dough had more than doubled. I punched it down to let out the air and folded it over itself 3 or 4 times. I then cut it in thirds shaped it into small baguettes, laid it out on a flour cutting board, covered it with a flour dusted towel and let it rise while I took the kiddos to Dunkin Donuts and then 9 am soccer practice (ugh)

Back from soccer at 11 I preheated the oven, scored my loafs and slid them into the oven. They came out great, although very small, they look like little hoggie rolls J That's probably what I should have used them for! We ate one for lunch, it was yum! My brother-in-law even stopped by and got to sample it fresh out of the oven; I wrapped another one up to give my friend Michele.

Boomerang Bread

So last night I baked bread. And for breakfast this morning I had toasted...

wait for it…

...Wonder Bread. Hubby has dubbed last night's creation "Boomerang Bread" I just call it terrible. So here is what not to do when baking bread.

Sunday night I took some old dough and decided I would start feeding it, a poolish but sort of a sourdough starter. By Tuesday morning I had fed it 3 times. It was smelling rather pleasantly sourdoughish. I put it in the fridge to stop any further fermenting and left it there while I was at work. That evening I took the starter out of the refrigerator and after letting it warm up a bit on the counter I mixed my final dough. The starter plus ½ tsp yeast, 2 tsp salt, ¾ cup warm water and 3 cups all-purpose flour. I let it rise on the counter for 2 hours before covering and letting rest in the refrigerator overnight. In the morning I took it out of the refrigerator and plopped it into a larger bowl. Here it is important to note that I did not knead the bread or fold it over or anything, I think that wasn't a good thing. I was in a rush so I covered it and left it to rise on my counter while I worked.

When I came home after work the dough had risen nicely. I split it into 2 chunks then squeezed and rolled it into 2 loafs and after 45 minutes baked it. So really no kneading of this dough and not much rise time before baking. It was also a sticky wetter dough which made it hard to work with. I scored the first loaf and baked it, we were anxious to eat it so I took it out of the oven before it was really nice and brown. By the time I got ready to put in the second loaf I was trying to eat dinner which may be why I forgot to score that loaf and why, due to careless transfer to the oven, my loaf bent into sort of a boomerang shape.

See I told you it was terrible. Note that since I didn't score it, theres a blowout on the side of the loaf. And thats why you should score your bread, so it expands where you want it to and it doesn't look like crap. We gnawed on the 1^st loaf while it was still warm but in the morning when I tried to cut the boomerang loaf to toast, I couldn't get a knife through it. So embarrassing. I'm contemplating what to do next. Really I'd like some more of my 'soccer day bread'. The weekend is coming I may have to try to recreate that success.

Soccer Day Bread

On Sunday I just couldn't stand having a day without bread baking. I had made my rather flat 2 day old starter bread on Saturday night and now there was nothing rising or baking in my kitchen. So I decided to see what kind of a bread I could create in one day. I worked with the same 4 ingredients I have been using; white flour, water, salt and yeast; oh and a piece of old dough.

I had saved a piece of the dough from my last batch of bread so I broke that in pieces and let soften in ½ cup warm water for 10 minutes. I then added 2/3 cup of all-purpose flour and 2/3 of a cup of bread flour. If you're wondering why I bother with the different flours, my thought was that the bread flour has higher gluten levels so I thought since I had a shorter time to let the gluten develop in my bread that maybe bread flour was the way to go, but I had already started with the all -purpose flour so I ended up with both. I had to use my hands to really incorporate everything.

I let it sit for 10 minutes to let the water be absorbed then I put it to mix with the dough hook in my Kitchen Aid. I went ahead and mixed the final dough now. As I'm retyping this it seems like maybe the whole first part was an extra step. I'm not really sure what it did! So I added 1 cup water, 3 cups bread flour, 1 tsp yeast and 2 tsp salt. I let this ride in the KA for 8 minutes on a med/low speed then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and placed in in a warm spot near our pellet stove, which on Sunday was on, yes it was that chilly!

Off I went in that cold weather to watch my little one play soccer. Three hours later I returned my risen dough to the KA which ran for 4 minutes. I then shaped the loaves and let them rise for 1 hour before putting them in a 500 degree oven that had been steamed. I reduced the temp to 400 after 5 minutes and baked an additional 12 minutes. Here is a photo of the result:

Not bad right? The dough was a much stiffer dough. I was able to shape it into loaves which in the hour I let them rise kept a great shape and gained some bulk. I had my first really sucessful scoring. I used a razor blade to slash the tops of my loaves and they split open just right. It was very satisfying. The crust had this amazing crackle. The inside was really soft and fluffy with lots of tiny little air bubbles, no big stretchy holes. I like big stetchy holes. This was very similar to a store bought Italian bread. I think it was a really good 'every day' kind of bread but it isn't special. So I'm trying to take what I learned from this dough and apply the good things like the hydration level of the final dough, the rise time of the final dough and the scoring technique and apply them to a longer fermenting bread which should have more complex flavor and lots of big stretchy holes!

When I got home from work at the end of Day 1 my "old dough starter" had about doubled in size. Before starting on dinner I mixed up my second stage starter, incorporating the "old dough starter" with more flour and water. I let that rise in a Tupperware container covered with plastic wrap until 10:00PM. This is what it looked like :

I took that starter and mixed the final dough in my Kitchen Aid. Right after mixing this is what my final dough looked like:

I covered it and left it out on the kitchen table overnight

The next morning it had really risen!

I folded I the dough over onto itself several times as best I could, it was really sticky and soft. Then plopped it into 3 flour dusted, towel lined bread pans. The bread pans were to keep the bread in a form as it rose since it was so loose it wouldn't have risen into a loaf shape if I had left it out on a flat surface to rise. I covered the bread pans and went to work. When I came home from work the loaves looked like this:

I preheated my oven to 500 degrees then took my peel style cutting board, sprinkled with rice flour and turned the dough out of the towel lined pan onto the cutting board. It immediately became very pancake like. The dough was too soft to hold the shape. I threw a cup of water onto a cookie sheet I had at the bottom of my oven to "steam" my oven and then slid the 1^st loaf of bread in.

After 5 minutes of 500 degree cook time I lowered the temp to 400 and baked another 15 before I fetched my bread from the oven and this is what it looked like:

VERY FLAT!! I wasn't too happy. But I cut it open and liked the look of the inside:

The taste was quite good too. I baked two more loaves, one of them very similar to the 1^st, the last I folded over a few times then shaped into a long baguette. That went into the oven about a half hour later. I don't really like the tiny size slices of bread that a French style baguette provides but that was the best looking best risen loaf of the three.

I think there's two things that didn't work here. 1^st my dough was too wet for the type of loaf I wanted to make. I think if I cooked in in some type of a pan the result might be better. If I want the more rustic free form bread then my final dough will have to be a bit drier. Also I was surprised that the loaf didn't gain much height when I put it in the oven. I think it is necessary to at least fold the dough over a few times within 2 hours of baking it. Having not worked the loaf at all for 8 hours prior to baking it didn't work. 8 hours of rising meant there was no more rising left for the dough to do when it hit the oven.

So next I will make the same recipe in the same steps using slightly less water in the final dough and giving the dough a fold and final shape 45 minutes before baking it.

1st step in 1st attempt

Well I made it to work today, on time, even with the cruddy weather we are having here in Connecticut this morning. I also managed to do the very 1st step in my 2 day plan. It was not easy to find the 5 minutes to add my old dough to the water and flour this morning. I ended up with quite the bad hair day because of it, although if I hadn't hit the snooze button at least 5 times… but anyway; I broke up the little old ball of dough I had saved from my last batch of bread and soaked it in warm water at the bottom of a good sized plastic Tupperware container. I failed to mention in my little grid from yesterday that the old dough should be about a walnut sized piece. My piece was actually more like small plum size so I added a touch more water, better too wet I think. It's all stirred together and sitting out, covered with plastic wrap in my kitchen. I so wish I was home to sniff it, I love the smell of rising dough.

A preliminary 2 weekday bread baking plan

Day 1 - early AM before work	Mix a cut up piece of old dough in 1/4 cup warm water and add 2/3 cup flour to make my "old dough starter"
Day 1- early PM	Add 3/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup water creating my "second stage starter"
Day 1- late PM	Mix final dough using the second stage starter plus another 3 1/3 cups flour, 1 1/3 cups water and 1/2 tsp yeast. Mix in the Kitchen Aid with dough hook 5-8 minutes, sprinkle with 1 tablespoon kosher salt while it mixes. Cover and let rise overnight in refrigerator (attempt #1) (attempt #2 will rise on the counter)
Day 2- early AM before work	Shape the loaves (reserve a piece of dough for next time)
Day 2- all day	Let the loaves rise in floured towel lined baskets on the counter
Day 2- as soon as I get home from work	Preheat the oven to 500 degrees, steam the oven and then bake the bread

So this is what I've come up with for my 1st plan of attack for having fresh bread every other day on a working moms schedule. I adapted it from a great recipe in Julia Child's "Baking With Julia". We'll see how it goes. You can see for the last step on Day 1 I have 2 attempts listed. I'm going to try each of these ways of rising the bread and see how it effects the final product. So I guess tomorrow morning I start the 1st step! I'm glad I saved a piece of dough from my last batch of bread! Hmm that means I'll have warm fresh bread Friday night. I was going to make pizza for dinner that night but maybe pasta and a salad instead...

The photo loaf

Well the photo you see here for my blog is a result of today's bread baking. I am trying to develop some type of a plan and recipe that allows me to bake fresh artisan style, well developed bread every other day. Generally that shouldn't be that difficult a thing but I am working with some interesting constraints (but I suspect fairly common for working people). I have 10 minutes, tops, in the morning to devote to bread, an hour at most before dinner and about 3 or 4 hours in the late evening.

Last night I started a poolish. Using a formula found in my "Bread Baking" book I mixed the flour and water and what amounted to not much more than a tiny pinch of yeast together. It was really hard to figure the amounts since everything was in weights. That was okay for the flour and water but I don't have a super sensitive digital scale so measuring the .03 ounces of yeast that was called for in the "formula" was near impossible. I went with 1/8 of a tsp. I left it overnight in a loosely covered tupperware bowl.

This morning, making me late for work, I mixed the formulas remaining flour and water for a minute in my Kitchen Aid. I let that sit in the bowl for 10 minutes. I heard 20 minutes is recommended but I didn't have that long, then I added in my poolish which had bubbled a bit and expanded slightly despite the small amount of yeast I had put in it. Last, I added 2 tsps of yeast and started up my KA with the dough hook. I sprinkled kosher salt on the dough while it mixed. I think I used about a tbsp. but I didn't measure. I let it knead for 6 minutes before turning it back into the poolish tupperware bowl, covering and sprinting out the door to work at 9:15.

Hubby was home at 3:00 today so keeping it simple I told him to sprinkle some flour in the bowl and fold the dough over a few times. My plan was that the dough would have another 2.5 hours to rise back up. When I came home I was going to gingerly cut the dough in half, place it in a floured cloth lined basket and let it rise another 1/2 hour while the oven and baking stone heated up.

When I came in the door at 5:30 I found my husband folding the dough again and sprinkling more flour. After a brief panic attack I decided to go ahead with my original plan to let it rise 1/2 hour and then bake. I was really worried that the bread, having lost a lot of it's air 1/2 hour before baking wouldn't recover and would be dense.

I split the dough into two loaves, one smaller, to bake fast so we could eat it with dinner and the other larger which I could give a bit more rising time. I have old double ovens and I usually bake in the bottom, so while the bottom heated to 500 degrees F the top oven was warmed a bit by the oven below. I put my formed loaves in that top oven to rise. My little loaf actually gained some loft and really took off when I slid it into the super hot steaming oven. The result was a pretty good loaf of bread. The family loved it and I was just so happy the bread hadn't been ruined. The second loaf with a bit more rise time came out even better. I'm still striving for a crisper, chewier more "Artisan" style crust but for my 1st documented attempt it wasn't bad!

My 1st post

I decided to start this blog with the hope that it will keep me focused on my goal of enjoying the little things in life. One of my favorite "little things" is baking bread. I have purchased some books on the topic, searched the internet and visited bread baking enthusiast message boards. From all of those activities I have learned a great deal about bread baking, I have also learned how much there is to know and hence how little I actually know. I'm also finding that no matter how much you read about it, bread baking is all about trying things for yourself. So here on this blog I will chronicle the trials, tribulations and success I encounter while learning about bread.