I'm currently on vacation and am finding myself with absolutely no adequate tools for making a loaf of bread, but I'm doing it anyway :)  I thought it would be fun to hear people's stories of making bread when they have none of their normal, or even acceptable, tools and hear about how it came out.  Please share!

I'm currently in a vacation home and have none of my normal 'old reliables'...I'm not going to buy a bunch of stuff just to make a few loaves while here, so, here's what I've done:

Ingredients, luckily, aren't a problem.  I don't have my starter, obviously, so I stopped by the grocery and picked up some KAF bread flour and a pack of instant yeast.  The water is undrinkable here so I also picked up some big jugs of drinking water.

The hardest park so far is being without a scale.  Without weight measurements and without memorized recipes based on volume measurements, it's been more difficult than I thought to do a bunch of conversions from measure to weight to figure out a bakers percentage.  I didn't try very hard to find a 'by volume' recipe, so it was a bit harder than it needed to be.

After googling some cups -> weight or tbs->weight conversions, I got something I thought was close.  From there, I relied on my hands to tell me when the hydration was right.

I had no bowls so I mixed and fermented my dough in a casserole dish which worked ok.  Without a baking stone, I plan on baking on a cookie sheet with a second sheet preheaded in the oven to hold the steam-creating ice cubes.  

There's nothing within 50 miles, apparently, sharp enough to score the bread without tearing it, so I found a pair of office scissors (which I washed thoroughly) and plan on making my cuts using that...we'll see.

As you can hear I'm not finished....I'm currently proofing and am about to put it in the oven.  We'll see! 

In the end, even handmade bad bread is delicious bread...so it can only go so wrong. :)  Share you're stories about your most makeshift loaf...I'd love to hear them!

Hi, everybody!

Maybe this is a bit silly, since I've already exchanged messages with a few of your wonderful selves and posted my own question about how best to bake bread on a Coleman camp stove - and I received so many fantastic ideas and suggestions - but I hadn't really given an Official Introduction; essentially, I'm a writer and stumbling but devoted baker living in Hungary, and I've been so enthralled by the whole Fresh Loaf community.  

My husband suggested I post a link to my blog here on the website.  Since I'm a writer, I end up posting largely a bunch of diminutive short stories, but some of these stories are actually inspired by bread, of all things (!), and I've posted recipes, including my rendition and a fiction for Moroccan khoubz flatbread, the Fresh Loaf pita recipe and the camp stove method I used for it (but with full credit and a link to this website, don't worry!), and most recently a fiction and my recipe for basic pizza dough with my own ridiculous pizza design and toppings.  

Here's a link:

http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com

It's not really epical, I think, but it's got baking and some writerly absurdities, so if it lends anybody a few ideas or a bit of entertainment, I'll be glad enough... but in the meantime, I just have to give everybody at the Fresh Loaf a most enormous thank-you for all your generosity, help, ideas, and general virtuoso kitchen skills!  Until later, blessings,

Erzsebet