This will be a quick post today because:
- I’m tired.
- I burned two left fingers today and they still hurt when I type.
- I’m sleepy.
- I’m tired.
- My fingers hurt. Because I sort of burned them today.
See? Such a variety of reasons.
But I wanted to show you this bread that I made today. Not just because making it involved a whole lot of pain, but also because, after the first bite, I actually flirted with the notion that the excruciating, mind-numbing, I’d-rather-get-my-impacted-wisdom-teeth-pulled-out-again pain might have actually been worth it.
(And to give you some perspective, I actually woke up in the middle of that unforgettable oral surgery adventure. The doctor was struggling to extract Tooth #3 when I woke up and gave him such a look, I must have been channeling the drill he was using on me. I think I startled him, then he promptly knocked me out again. So, yes. It was painful.)
I’m sorry if that made you cringe, but I was trying to accurately convey the extent of the pain of the oven burn. And, as a consequence, the extent of the awesomeness of this bread that actually made the pain temporarily bearable.
Isn’t she pretty?
No kneading involved, and the dough supposedly keeps for up to 2 weeks in your refrigerator. Which means you can whip up a big batch of this dough, break off a large chunk every day, and have freshly baked homemade crusty bread on a daily basis.
Here’s what the dough looks like:
The dough is nice and wet, so it can bake long enough to get that gorgeous crust on it without drying out the inside. I stored the dough in a large Tupperware container, and although this batch was supposed to last us 7 days, it was so good that I ended up baking half of it on Day 1.
I love that this bread is ridiculously simple. Flour, water, yeast, and salt. That’s it. Nothing more. Yet the taste is so wonderfully complex, and it just gets better as the dough sits longer.
I’ll include more details in my next post, so you can join me in my newfound bread-making madness. Like I said, it’s almost embarrassingly simple, requires very little work, and is so easy to do. Really, the only difficult part is remembering to keep you fingers away from the screaming hot oven door.
Although something tells me I’ll be remembering that from now on.
Baking bread is one of those addictions that I cycle through two or three times a year. My loaves never turn out as beautiful as that, though!! Wow.
Hi…i’m finally getting to your blog to check out some of your tutorials…looks like i’ll be getting more than that…can’t wait for this recipe…i love baking bread. here’s a website i just stumbled across if you’re interested…http://www.atthebakersbench.com/…beware though it might make you give up photography!
It looks like the kind of bread my dear husband would LOVE for me to make him every single day. I’m more of a fluffy white bread kinda gal. LOL
You make it sound very easy though so I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try…
New to your blog and we love to bake bread so pulleeze let us in on the recipe ! Can’t wait to try it ! And thanks shelle for the baking website too !
I came over from ” the pioneer woman” your bread looks fantastic and i for one would really like to have this dough in my fridge at all times………looking forward to the recipe
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[...] promised, I’m going to share with you the recipe for that wonderful bread in my previous post. It was made using a master recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day by Jeff Hertzberg and [...]