Baking Bread



Couronne cooling on the rack



A photo in the sun for better light

Batard

The book where it all began

Today was my one weekend day off and I had a fair bit to do...in the kitchen. My lovely friend Leon was coming over with his little boy and Harry's friend, Billy, and it is my sisters birthday so we were headed over there in the afternoon for a margarita to celebrate. As I worked yesterday for a 13 hour day I hadn't had much of a chance to do anything let alone make anything of the weekend. I started the day making pikelets for Harry for breakfast which are his favourite. I had some left over to have with jam and cream for when Leon and Billy came over. I also baked some chocolate Sables from Dorie Greenspan's new book 'Around my French Table' (I'll post about them during the week). As well as that I baked some baked some bread to take to my sisters.

This bread is AMAZING!! it is from this book called 'Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day' and what a revelation this book is. You make a lot of dough without any need to knead and this stays in the fridge for up to 2 weeks. You can shape it how you like and the book has lots of different ideas as well as various recipes for different types of dough like Flatbreads and Enriched breads. The bread is wonderful. I tend to stick to the Boule dough as I love the thick crunchy crust and the lovely interior of the bread. As it spends longer in the fridge the dough takes on more of a sourdough flavour. We had ours with fresh butter and it really was very very delicious. The method here is very important and it can be found on the internet. There is another method/recipe around called No Knead Bread and even though this is good, it is more time consuming than this method and produces a very similar loaf of bread. Have a search for it and give it a go. 

Here is Harry and Billy having something to eat in the middle of playing.

Beautiful boys