Rise

It's not new to people who do it professionally but rising at 5:30am to prep a loaf of bread for baking shows dedication I think. Depriving oneself of sleep for food, I know will confuse some of you. I thought I would include a couple of pictures of the finished product. And before you ask I had the loaf setting on two wooden spoons because I don't have a cooling rack, so I figured it'd be easy to suspend the bread above the counter with those just as easily as a cooling rack. (Note: This idea probably won't work with chocolate chip cookies.)

This loaf is based off the "no kneed" bread recipe. I found out that the yeast we had gotten at the store was the "old fashioned" kind and not the "instant" stuff. So it really didn't have time to do much of it's thing in my previous loaf, but this time around I let the yeast take a bit of a warm bath first to wake them up. This time around the loaf was much less dense. I added cinnamon to the "No Kneed" recipe and let it do it's thing.

This morning before I formed the loaf I laid out the dough and covered it in brown sugar, cinnamon and rasins. I then rolled it up and let it sit for an hour. Then into the oven it went for 50 minutes (cooking in the dutch oven) and out it came to sit for 45 minutes making sounds. The final verdict is the crust is almost like steel (same with the last loaf), and will soften over time. However as far as "fresh" bread goes it's kind of disappointing to have to gnaw the bread. What do you think? Lower heat? Longer baking time?


I think I will end up calling this loaf the Smiling Cinnamon Raisin Bread recipe. Took about 24 hours from point I started mixing flour and water to the point I started to cut into it. I probably only really spent maybe an hour in "hands on" time. I might try and make rolls with it next time if I can figure out how to drop the toughness of the crust a bit.

On the way to church this morning Lisa and I were privy to some actual road rage. Blue jeep merged into white truck and it kind of looked like the blue jeep was on drugs or something, but then the white truck exited the freeway and the blue jeep did a quick swerve on the freeway and followed the white truck. The white truck then got back on the free way and blue jeep followed, speed up to the white truck and looked like they were going to ram the back of the truck. We exited the freeway at this point. I don't know if blue jeep knew white truck and had something going on there, or if blue jeep was ticked off white truck wouldn't let him in and just merged into him or what. It was some very "angry" driving going on. Remember, drive friendly, the Texas way.

~B.