Breadventures

Hello, best bread I have ever made. Just look at your charming crumb! I like you, especially slathered in spinach dip.

Way way back in March last year I went through a brief bread-baking phase, at which time I discovered this YouTube video. Watch it, and I guarantee you will want to bake bread too:


I bought the Tartine Bread book and then was frightened by the chapter-long Basic Country Bread recipe (28 pages!), and that was that.


Ten months later, I finally succeeded in wrapping my brain around this recipe, and my dutch oven gave birth to a beautiful round crusty loaf.


I used the starter that Grace gave me back in the day. Happily, you can ignore the starter at the back of your fridge for months at a time, and it will still refresh if you feed it a few times, and especially if you actually follow the directions that the book tells you (which is: discard all but a tablespoon of starter, and add 200 g warm water and 200 g flour. [You absolutely need a metric scale for this.]).

How do you know if your starter is ready? Drop a spoonful into a bowl of water. If it floats, it's good to go.


Here's one more picture of my bread. He looks like he's wearing a crown. He MAY AS WELL BE, that's how good he is.


I also made some Quick and Buttery Dinner Rolls this week, because of Twitter. I followed a tweet about easy bread recipes and the result was buns for dinner. Amazing how Twitter can change your fate like that. Internet!

I don't necessarily recommend this recipe. I'm not a bread expert, actually I know very little about bread, but I'm going to guess that adding baking powder to bread dough is not the coolest thing to do. But the recipe promised to take ONLY 30 MINUTES so I went with it. (P.S. It lied. Factoring in rising time and extra oven time, it took closer to an hour.) Anyway I wasn't a huge fan of these, but I suppose they were redeemed by the step in the recipe where you pour an entire stick of melted butter on them. Also I have lived off of them for the last two days. That is the problem with baking bread; you end up eating a lot of bread.