Dave’s Blog

So, Today I started making bread using Ruhlman’s ratio recipe, and to conquer my this far failure to make bread.

Step 1 was to measure the flour

Weighing the flour

Then mix it and knead it

Sticky dough

Sweet balls of dough!

And then I left it to rise for two hours. What do you do for two hours?

Arise!!! I poked it to see if it had risen enough... it didn't spring back, so it had risen enough.

Then I punched it down and kneaded again and put it in the oven, praying that the bread would not be dense and doughy! I wanted to add some steam to the start of the process, so I had a ceramic casserole dish that had preheated with the oven and wanted to add boiling water to so that it created steam. When I added the water I heard a crack and I knew instantly the ceramic dish had broken. D’oh!

Bake my pretty!!

40 Minutes later I took the loaf out of the oven!! It felt lighter than the previous boule’s, so that was a good start.

Looks good.

It looked good, It smelled good, it had a hollow sound when I tapped the bottom – it even crackled when it came out of the oven like bread should!! Cutting into the loaf and seeing the bread was like a dream come true! finally my bread was breadlike!

Nice!

What do you do with awesome bread – Eat it of course!!

Nothing better than to cover fresh bread with German pork products!

Sweet, sweet Nutella! Did it pass the Nutella test?

So did the bread pass the Nutella test? The bread was fantastic – awesome crust and good inside. Rach said it needed a bit more salt and I agreed, and I think the oven here runs a bit too hot, so next time I’ll turn it down a bit and see if I can get the dough a bit more fluffy!

Coming up – I’ll make the bread again and try some other variations.