No Knead Pizza Dough

This makes a very wet dough, but you weren't going to toss it in the air anyway. 

Ingredients:
3 c. bread or AP flour
2 t salt
1/4-1/2 t 'instant' or 'rapid rise' dry yeast
1 1/2 c. water
Olive oil for second rise

Directions:
The first bit is exactly the same as no-knead bread: 
Mix dry ingredients in a bowl.  Stir in water until it makes a nice shaggy ball; cover with plastic wrap and let rise until flat and bubbly (anywhere from 8-12 hours or more).

If you're in a hurry (less than 8 hours until dinner), use more yeast (up to 1/2 t) and set in a warm location.  Lately, setting the bowl outside in the sun will get the dough to rise in just a couple of hours.
 
The second rise differs slightly:
 Oil your hands and four small bowls; cereal bowls work nicely.  Divide the dough evenly into quarters and roll into balls.  Put them into the bowls, oil the tops, and re-cover with plastic wrap. 

Let rise until doubled in size (1-4 hours, depending on yeast amount and temperature.)

Bacon corn bread

This was a very rich corn bread; plus, bacon makes everything better!  This is crunchier and less dense than the last corn bread I made.  The outside edges are cooked in bacon fat, and as such are delicious.  Next time, I'll crumble the bacon into smaller pieces to get more bacon throughout instead of fewer, larger pieces.

Adapted, as ever, from How to Cook Everything.

Soft oatmeal bread

This bread completely reaffirms my love of no-knead breads.  This is super tasty, but so much more work, and produces a completely different kind of bread.  It takes about 3 hours from start to finish, which is of course much faster than the no-knead kind, but also requires a solid 30-40 minutes of actual work time, plus WAY more cleanup.

It does make a really soft, fluffy bread, though.  I'm pretty sure it will make fantastic sandwiches. 

No-knead oatmeal bread

Another variation on no-knead bread; again, super easy and delicious. Kind of softer and chewier than whole wheat, and makes amazing sandwiches and toast.


1 c. rolled oats ('old-fashioned', NOT instant)
2 c. bread flour
1-1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. rapid rise yeast
1-1/3 c. water
1 T honey

Mix together dry ingredients; stir honey into water.

Stir sweetened water into flour mixture; dough should form into a shaggy ball.

Cover tightly with plastic wrap; let sit at room temperature for 8-12 hours, until bubbly.

Stir dough to punch it down; glop it into a well-oiled loaf pan. Sprinkle top with more oats. Cover loosely with plastic wrap; let rise 2-4 hours, until doubled in size.

Bake at 350 for 45-50 minutes.

Corn bread

As fond as I am of Jiffy corn muffin mix, sometimes it's nice to have a heartier cornbread that doesn't double as dessert. Especially along with chili.


This made a super dense, savory corn bread.

From How to Cook Everything, using more or less the 'Corny Corn Bread' variation. I'm quite excited to try the 'Bacon Corn Bread' listed right under it, but thought it might be a bit rich with chicken chili.

Corny Corn Bread
1-1/4 c. buttermilk (or, as I used here, regular milk with 1 T white vinegar stirred in)
3 T butter
1-1/2 c. cornmeal
1/2 c. flour
1-1/2 t baking powder
1 t salt
1 T sugar
1 egg
kernels from 1 ear of sweet corn (or 1 c. frozen corn)

Preheat oven to 375; make sour milk if not using buttermilk.

Put butter in pan or skillet; heat on stove (if pan is stovetop safe) or in oven (if not). It will melt and turn all nutty smelling; take it off of the heat before it burns.

Mix together dry ingredients in a bowl; mix the egg into the buttermilk. Stir the buttermilk mixture into the cornmeal mixture. Stir in the corn.


Pour the batter into the pan; bake for 30 minutes.


NOTE: Yes, the milk with vinegar looks icky and smells weird. It's sour milk; it's supposed to. (Sadly, the picture of the lumpy milk-- white lumps in a white liquid-- did not come out on my little point and shoot.)

Bagels!

Or very nearly. They tasted like bagels, even if they didn't look like them.


This was, of course, my fault. Instead of starting with bagel dough, I had no-knead bread dough that I decided to make bagels with. Predictably, instead of staying in the bagel shape, it kind of blobbed back into amorphous rolls. Which I then boiled and baked.


Boiling is what makes bagels all nice and chewy; baking makes them crispy. I boiled each bagel for about a minute on each side (using the method from How to Cook Everything), then set on a rack to drain.

I then baked for 25 minutes at 400 degrees. The bagels were SO good, except for the very minor finger burns that resulted from trying to spread cream cheese on something that had just come out of the oven.

Flatter than I meant it to be bread

I probably should not have been surprised that very wet, unkneaded bread dough, when baked on a flat surface, likes to rise sideways, rather than up. Stupid gravity.

This blob-like dough resulted in a loaf of bread that looked like a beached jellyfish. Super tasty, though, and it looked pretty enough after it was sliced. Nice crust, and lots of it.


It was particularly delicious dipped in olive oil and herbs and with gazpacho.


No-knead flatbread
(once again, adapted from Mark Bittman's no knead bread.)

Ingredients:
3 c. bread flour
1/4 t. fast rise yeast
1-1/2 t. salt
1-1/2 c. water
Olive oil (for pan and top of loaf)
Cornmeal (for pan and top of loaf)

Mix dry ingredients in mixing bowl; stir in water until dough forms a ball. Cover with plastic wrap; let sit at room temperature overnight or until surface is dotted with bubbles.

Punch down (by stirring); let rest for 20 minutes. Oil a shallow baking sheet; I sprinkled mine with cornmeal so the crust would be crunchier and so it would stick even less.

Place dough on sheet; attempt to form a loaf; watch as it sinks into a puddle shaped blob. Drizzle oil and sprinkle cornmeal over top. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let sit for at least two hours, or until blob doubles in size and doesn't immediately spring back when poked.

Bake at 400 for 35-45 minutes.

Flour tortillas

I think these are worth the effort... tortillas that are yummy in and of themselves, rather than just a vehicle for fillings. From The Homesick Texan.


Texas Flour Tortillas
(adapted from The Border Cookbook by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison)

Ingredients:
2 c. all-purpose flour
1-1/2 t baking powder
1 t salt
2 t vegetable oil
3/4 c. warm milk

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and oil.
Slowly add the warm milk.
Stir until a loose, sticky ball is formed.


Knead for two minutes on a floured surface. Dough should be firm and soft.


Place dough in a bowl and cover with a damp cloth or plastic wrap for 20 minutes.
After the dough has rested, break off eight sections, roll them into balls in your hands, place on a plate (make sure they aren’t touching) and then cover balls with damp cloth or plastic wrap for 10 minutes. (It’s very important to let the dough rest, otherwise it will be like elastic and won’t roll out to a proper thickness and shape.)


After dough has rested, place a dough ball on a floured surface, pat it out into a four-inch circle, and then roll with a rolling pin from the center until it’s thin and about eight inches in diameter. Repeat 7 times.

Keep rolled-out tortillas covered until ready to cook. If you need put them aside for more than a few minutes, keep tortillas separated with plastic wrap between each one.

In a dry skillet heated on high, cook the tortilla about thirty seconds on each side. It should start to puff a bit when it’s done.

Keep cooked tortillas covered wrapped in a napkin until ready to eat.

Makes eight tortillas.

I served them with fajitas... 1 out of 1 husbands agree: Thumbs up!

Eggs and toast!

Not a recipe... but this was weekend breakfast perfection. Eggs over easy and homemade toast.


Just look at the open crumb structure of the bread (Craig says that this was my best loaf of bread yet):

Super easy sandwich bread

Now with step-by-step pictures and timeline!

This is a variation on the world's easiest bread; use 2 cups bread flour and one cup whole wheat flour. It's less dense than the 100% whole wheat version, and not as strong tasting as bread with a 24 hour rise time.


Ingredients
2 c. bread flour
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 1/2 t. salt
3/4 t. active dry yeast (the kind that says it's 'great for bread machines')
1 1/2 c. water
1 T. honey
olive oil (to grease pan)
cornmeal (optional-- to dust pan and add crunch to crust)

1. Mix dough (8:00 AM)
Takes five minutes or less.

In med-large size mixing bowl, combine flour, salt, and yeast:


Add 1 1/2 c water and stir in with spoon; dough will form into a shaggy ball. If you need to, add more water, a couple of tablespoons at a time, and stir until it looks like this:


Cover with plastic wrap; let rise in a warm place for 8-10 hours or so until bubbly. It will look something like this when ready:


2. Second rise (6:00 PM)
Takes ten minutes, including preparing the pan.

Drizzle a tablespoon of honey across the top of the dough; stir in. The dough will be very stretchy, which will allow it to trap gas bubbles formed by the yeast and give the finished loaf a nice crumb structure.


(Apologies for the terrible picture; it's tricky to take a photo in bad light with one hand while stretching the dough with the other.) The stirring will punch down the dough; when it's back to being in a ball shape, just glop it into a greased loaf pan. I like to dust the pan and top of the dough with cornmeal, which makes it easier to remove the loaf from the pan and gives the finished bread a crunchier crust.


Cover the pan loosely with the plastic wrap, and put back in a warm spot for a couple of hours until the dough has doubled in size.

3. Bake bread (9:00 - 9:45 PM)
Takes less than a minute-- enough time to remove plastic wrap and put into oven.

Once your dough has risen a second time in the pan, it will look something like this:


Preheat oven to 350; bake for 45-50 minutes. Your house should smell amazing after about 20.


Remove from pan, cool on rack, enjoy!


Time from start to finish: 12-14 hours
Time spent actually doing anything with the dough: less than 15 minutes.

World's easiest bread

I've stopped buying bread altogether. I've adapted this from Mark Bittman's no knead whole wheat bread recipe; it takes 10-30 hours (timing is very forgiving), but only about 10 minutes of actual involvement. Mostly it just has to sit awhile.

3 c. whole wheat flour (or a mix of whole wheat and white bread flour, or replace up to 1 c. wheat flour with something else, like rye flour or cornmeal.)
1 1/2 t. salt
1/2 - 1 t. instant active dry yeast
1 1/2 c water
1 T. honey or maple syrup (optional)
Olive or other oil (for greasing pan)

Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add water; the dough should form into a shaggy ball. If it's too dry, add a couple more tablespoons of water. Cover with plastic wrap; let sit for 8-24 hours at room temperature until flat and bubbly on top.

When ready for second rise, oil a loaf pan, mix in a tablespoon of something sweet into the dough, and dump the dough into the loaf pan. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or clean dish towel; let rise until doubled in size, 2-6 hours. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes, until hollow sounding when knocked. Remove from pan; cool on cooling rack, or better yet, eat it fresh out of the oven.

For shorter rise time, use more yeast and warmer room temperature; I find that the top of the fridge tends to work well. A longer rise time will create a more complex tasting bread (kind of sourdough-y and delicious.)

So much yummier than anything you can buy in the baked goods aisle, and total ingredient cost is less than you could find in your couch cushions.