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bread free form

Before you experiment; follow the tutorials

I’ve always loved bread, real bread — you know the stuff. And I’ve always wanted to be able to make my own, so from time to time my roommate and I would attempt to make our own bread, but would end up with something that resembled thick pancakes rather than bread loaves. This happened until I found a book, Beard on Bread, in a small hole-in-the-wall book store. I browsed through it and realized I’d hit the jackpot! I bought the book and took it home.

A few weeks later, during a weekend when I wasn’t too busy with other projects or video games, I decided to make my first actual real loaf of bread. I set out to get all the ingredients, but i had no idea what to get! I looked through the book trying to find something that didn’t look too hard, yet sounded enticing. I settled for a Broiled Free Form Loaf. I made my list and headed out to the store. I quickly learned that while Wal-Mart has a lot of stuff, when you’re looking for variety in choice in a specific category, there’s not much to choose from. I got the ingredients, having to find alternatives for things like unbleached flour (went with bleached instead).

I made it home and began to get out all my tools. Mixing bowl, check; cleared off workspace, check; bread knife, check; pizza/cookie sheet thing, check. I began with proofing the yeast in a measuring cup and mixing the dry ingredients together in the mixing bowl. After the yeast had proofed, i mixed the dry mix with the yeast and began mixing the dough with my hands, adding in the oil and buttermilk, soon it was very tough and barely sticking to the sides of the mixing bowl. From there i moved to the cleared (and now floured) work space and started kneading the dough. I have to say, kneading dough is a lot tougher than I originally anticipated! After kneading the dough and letting it rise, punching it down, kneading it some more and letting it rise, and then punching it down again and kneading it one last time, and finally letting it rise again, I placed the dough on the cookie sheet glazed it with some sort of egg concoction and put it in the oven.

After 20 minutes I switched the oven from broil to bake and let the bread bake for another 25 minutes. After it was golden brown it looked like this:

It was delicious 😀

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