Summertime bread
It’s summertime. We are on holidays. We’re staring at the sun and there’s no decent bread to buy near us. We will have to bake a bread, but we don’t have sourdough, we don’t have good quality flour. The oven in our beach apartment is very basic. Never mind. We want to eat real bread. We will get a soft crumb, crunchy crust, and neutral flavour bread that will fit with any kind of meal we have.
Ingredients:
- 500 gr of bread flour
- 360 ml lukewarm water
- 10 gr salt
- 2 gr instant yeast or 6 gr fresh yeast.
- A wash tub
- A wooden spoon
- Eagerness
- Sunglasses, flip-flops, a towel, and sun lotion
09.00 h. Mix the flours and almost all the water. Let it rest 20-30 minutes. Add salt. Fold the dough 2-3 times until salt is integrated in the dough. Add yeast. Fold the dough 2-3 times until yeast is integrated in the dough. Add the rest of the water. It is a sticky dough, so we won’t knead, we will strecht and fold.
09.30 h. Put the dough into a wash tub. The dough will be resting between 4:30 and 5 hours, depending on the room temperature. We should strecht and fold the dough 2 or 3 times in the first 1:30 hours of fermentation. So at 11.00 h we could get the sunglasses, flip-flops, the towel, and the sun lotion, and go to the beach.
It’s between 14:00 and 14:30. Dust your proofing basket with flour. Shape into a ball. Place the seam side down in its proofing basket. Let it rest between 1 hour and 1 hour and ¼, depending on the room temperature.
15:30 h. Place the bread into the oven at 240C (465F). Bake it 15 minutes at 240 with some steam, then open the door, remove the moisture, and then reduce the heat 15C (60F) every 10 minutes. This bread should be baked in 50 minutes + 5 minutes into the oven switched off. The final temperature before you switch off the oven should be 180C (355F).
At 16.25 h. your bread is ready.
Have a nice holiday and enjoy bread wherever you go.
More info: http://breadgallery.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/pan-verano-chancletas-summertime-bread/
It looks good and it sounds great. By the way, did the beach cottage furnish scales, or did you pack them with you? I rent out a beach cottage, and would not think to put in kitchen scales. My renters would not know what to do with them!
Ford
Is it very unusual outside of the UK to use scales? I've heard a lot of this on this site and I was a bit confused. I don't know anyone at all, even students, who don't have scales. It's so normal and expected here.
In the USA most home cooks use volume measurements, and few cookbooks give the measurements by weight. In the past five years I have adopted the habit of weighing my ingredients. I find it not only more accurate, but also easier than volume measurements. I make the exception for very small amounts such as the tablespoon, the teaspoon, and the fractional teaspoons. I just don't have a scale to measure in the fractional grams or hundredths of an ounce.
Ford
I bought a cheap kitchen scale in a chinese shop. You find everything there!
Have a nice day!