5
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What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
More exciting things from me, I baked my first loaf of bread this week! Last week, I bought a 5lb/2ish kg of flour and in my excitement to try baking, I followed a recipe from YouTube home cook Adam Ragusea for a "legate loaf", basically a no-knead flat baguette-ish? bread. In his recipe video, he constantly tells you how easy this loaf is and requires no skill. Well, I managed to royally mess it up by making the dough too wet and then burning the loaf in the oven. The main reason why I messed up the dough was because I didn't have a way to easily measure the flour so I eyeballed wrong and then I eyeballed wrong again when adding water. I messed up the actual bake since Ragusea mentions spraying the dough for the first few minutes of it baking. However, I don't have a food-grade spray bottle. I thought I could just use a second pan with water to steam the dough to try and achieve something similar but this was too ambitious for my first ever loaf. I underbaked it at first so I put it back in to bake some more but didn't set a timer and then returned to a burnt cracker in my oven.
Undeterred, I decided to try another one of Ragusea's recipes this week, this time for "Pizza Bread". It's essentially a cold fermented pizza dough that he just bakes plain topped with salt, garlic powder and black pepper. I discovered that some of the food storage containers I have had actual measurements of their volumes so I used that when trying to make this recipe. Adam's latest video recipe on this makes 2 big loaves so I halved that recipe and made two smaller ones instead. I baked the first loaf after just a few hours of proofing and I baked the second one after a few days of cold fermentation in my fridge. Both loaves came out amazing! I wish I took pics to share but I inhaled those loaves real quick haha. I was surprised by how much of a difference the cold ferment made. I will definitely be trying this again in the future, especially with Adam's technique of using a spoon to mix the dough without getting your hands dirty. Great recipe to try as a lazy/first-time baker.
If you haven’t stumbled across it yet, I highly recommend Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread. Very little fuss, just a higher time cost (~20 hours) and it consistently makes loaves that punch way above their weight class. That said, the high temperatures make it easy to burn IMO. I dust it with semolina in the Dutch oven instead of regular flour since it’s less prone to burning, and I rest the Dutch oven on top of pizza stones in the oven to shield the bottom from burning.
Ah yeah I came across this during my research for a simple bread to bake. I just don't have a Dutch oven or a pizza stone/steel. I read about just using a sheetpan and metal bowl as a cover to create a makeshift oven-in-an-oven thing but that's a little ambitious for me haha.
I chose Adam's recipes I mentioned since they required no extra equipment beyond what I had haha