Makeshift Bread Baking Experiences
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!