Talk About Tuesday

Talk About Tuesday is a blog carnival where we all write a post of something we want to share or talk about and link them all together on the lazy organizer’s blog. It’s a great way to get to know other bloggers and make connections in the blogosphere.

- - - - - - - - - -

Inspired by Lara's Talk About post last week about sour dough I thought I’d tell you about my bread making adventures this week!

About a week ago, I was reading on someone’s blog about a book called “Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day”. I looked into this further and thought what an excellent idea it was. Basically once a week you mix up a big batch of dough using nothing more than yeast, salt, water and plain ordinary all purpose flour. (some of the fancier recipes in the book use other ingredients, but you get the idea) You let it rise for 2 hours then stick it in the fridge. Any time you want to make a loaf, you pull a chunk of dough off, flour the surface, shape it, let it rise on a pizza paddle sprinkled with cornmeal, then bake after rising.

So I ordered the book. Thankfully Amazon UK did have it, BUT I will have to wait a week or two to get it.

In the meantime I discovered that various places on the internet have the authors on video making their very basic recipe. So I watched it and made a batch of dough!

Ho hum! From our results from that batch compared to what today’s batch looks like I am pretty sure I lost count during the cups of flour and put 1 too few in! We also used table salt instead of kosher salt, because no one has kosher salt over here. Apparently if you are using tale salt in this recipe you only need about half the amount but I did not find that nugget of information until AFTER I had made our first batch.

Hence our loaves were VERY relaxed, they spread a lot! (the lack of enough flour), and you could tell from the taste there was too much salt. It wasn’t overpowering but it was certainly saltier than it was meant to be.

I baked the last of that first batch this morning and just made a new batch this afternoon. used half the amount of salt and the right number of cups of flour. I made sure of this by getting out 6 knives (you need 6 1/2 cups of flour) for levelling off the top of the flour scoop. As I used each knife I switched it from one side of the container to the other. I figure rinsing off 6 knives that had only had dry flour on them was a lot easier than dealing with the spreading dough like that.

If you want to read more talk about it posts, or even participate yourself, head on over to the lazy organizer by clicking on the talk about it Tuesday banner at the top of this post.