Bread

The great breadmaking experiment continues. I am unlikely at this rate to start a second career as a baker. I have worked my way through half a 10 kilo bag of flour, and I am finally getting the oven to turn out something partly edible.

I have a book on breadmaking, and it has lots of nice photos in it. After over a year of owning it, I finally looked closely at the photos. The dough is supposed to be absolutely wet and squishy, not firm and "dry" and well rounded. I have spent too much time in pizza restaurants observing these nice round balls of "dry" dough that are rolled out into nice, thin dry pizzas. To make buns and things, you actually need dough that is closer to your average swamp mud in consistency.

So I added about 50% more water today and produced an incredibly sticky goop that refused to exit from the mixing bowl without much coaxing. I dropped that onto some well floured pizza stones, let it rise for a while, then whacked it in the oven.

Bloody hell, 15 minutes later out it came, and 10 minutes later, it was all gone. I had to scrape the bread off the pizza stone, as it was so wet, it bonded to the stone like cement, but apart from that, it was ludicrously good. We had it with some zatar and oil and home made hummous and it was a great way to have lunch.

Except that we had run out of lemons, and it is hard to make hummous without lemons. I tried just a dash of lime (not wanting to overdo it) and found that the hummous was a bit bland - kind of like chickpea paste rather than hummous. I also underded the garlic (for the first time in my life) so that it didn't try and remove your upper palate from the rest of your head. Thankfully, the bread saved it.

I might become a baker after all.