ABin5

I'm not eating bread - at least right now anyway. Husband and I are about halfway into the yearly Awakening fast. Sadly the fast doesn't include bread. But I found this bread recipe that I wanted to make right now! So  I managed to bully mom and Dan into being test subjects. After two loaves, they don't appear to regret it.

Yesterday, Mom and I made the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes recipe. It's a bread recipe that has you make four loaves of bread that you bake when desired over the next two weeks. The dough stays in your refrigerator until you're ready to whack off a chunk and bake it. The recipe has easy and clear instructions except when it came to the shaping and scoring step. Luckily, shaping and scoring bread have tons of tutorials on the web. 

On day 2, I just shaped into a baguette straight out of the fridge. You don't have to worry too much about manhandling this dough it's pretty forgiving.

Scoring is a bit of an art that I haven't mastered yet. I usually end up deflating the dough rather than allowing it to expand further but I'll get it one day! Before I attempted to score the dough, I sprayed it with some oil to make it easier to score. The oil also makes sure the crust doesn't get too hard.

The finished loaf has a nice golden brown color which is partially due to mom's super awesome steam oven. The broiler pan steaming method works well enough but it's not the same as having a semi-professional appliance. The bread was really delicious as well as being easy to make and bake. The same authors have a ~70% whole wheat dough that I'm going to try next time.

You don't have to do all that shaping and scoring business if that doesn't appeal to you. You can just form it into a rough cylinder and put it into a greased loaf pan. I'm going to bring some dough to Vi's one day to try baking it in her bread maker.