OK, absolutely all evidence to the contrary, I think I know how to make bread now. The secret to baking, I have discovered, is learning from your mistakes, and the more mistakes you make, the more you learn. I\u2019m, like, a baking genius now.<\/p>\n
As the inaugural project in the Post team\u2019s campaign to keep me busy over the next however-many days of this stay-at-home order, I was ordered to learn how to bake bread, and you\u2019ll recall from yesterday\u2019s column (click here<\/a> if you\u2019ve somehow forgotten), my daughter and I did the preliminary work of buying yeast and following the recipe of my editor\/baking instructor Melissa Evans on the easiest bread recipe you\u2019ll ever find. We mixed the yeast, flour, salt and precisely 130-degree water in our expensive Bosch mixer and thereby logged our first mistake fairly early in the process and earned the mix of disappointment and rage of Melissa because it turned out I was supposed to do the mixing in a regular bowl with a wooden spoon like our pioneer forebears did.<\/p>\n The mistakes piled up: I wasted about half the mixture by rinsing the dough out of the mixer and its paddles, and hosed about a quarter loaf of nascent bread off my hands and wrists.<\/p>\n Anyhow, let\u2019s cut to the final stages, which began this morning at about 7:30 at which time I subjected myself to more verbal abuse from Melissa regarding how many errors I\u2019ve made during the last 24 hours, and they are legion.<\/p>\n The dough, which had risen on Thursday evening, had receded by about an inch overnight. Did I worry? I did not. I proceeded as though nothing had gone wrong.<\/p>\n I buttered up a Dutch oven (after first clearing up the fact that the name isn\u2019t horribly racist, although I learned that in the Netherlands they don\u2019t call a Dutch oven a Dutch oven.\u00a0 See, baking can be both educational and fun!) and, after more scolding from the tyrannical B\u00e4ckermeister <\/i>Evans\u2014this time in front of the entire office in a Zoom meeting\u2014to hurry up and put it in the oven. NOW!<\/p>\n So 25 minutes in the covered Dutch oven, followed by another 10-14 minutes uncovered to make it a nice golden brown, and, voila!<\/i> Done.<\/p>\n The loaf was maybe an inch and a half thick and round, rather than loaflike. It looked like a big, fluffy cookie, and yet I nevertheless loved it the way you can love the ugly runt of a litter of puppies.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we just accidentally invented flatbread,\u201d I told Hannah. And, while it was still piping hot, I cut it like a pie (mmmm, bread pie), we slapped some butter on it and polished off half a loaf. It was so crunchy on the outside that eating it made a racket that attracted the dogs, but, seriously, it was delicious in its own mutant, blunder-riddled way. Ah, the sweet taste of failure!<\/p>\n And when I bake bread again, I know how to do it right, which is almost the polar opposite of how I did it this time. Here\u2019s your recipe.<\/p>\n In a regular bowl (not a fancy electric mixer. In fact, unplug your mixer and put it in the garage), mix three cups of flour, one-quarter teaspoon of dry active yeast and one and a half teaspoons of salt. Then pour in one and two-thirds cups of water that\u2019s 120-130 degrees (it will help if you can imagine Melissa yelling \u201cThis is important!\u201d from the next room). Mix that until it\u2019s a sticky dough. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave it on the counter for anywhere between two and 24 hours. I left it out for about 25 hours; try four. Butter up the bottom of a Dutch oven (no offense) and drop your dough onto a heavily-floured surface and toss a couple tablespoons of flour on the dough and fold it in, do this a couple more times. Now you can drop the ball of dough into the Dutch oven\u2014I found out later (by sneaking behind my mentor\u2019s back, and watching a nice, calm \u201cJenny Can Cook\u201d YouTube video<\/a>) that you can put the dough on parchment paper instead and drop that in the Dutch oven.<\/p>\n Let it sit for one to two hours.<\/p>\n Preheat the oven to 450 degrees, then put the Dutch oven into your non-Dutch oven for 30 minutes, then uncover it (and take off the parchment paper if you\u2019re going that route) and bake it for another 15 minutes.<\/p>\n And you and the bread are done.<\/p>\n I promise I\u2019ll do better next time. Apparently, it\u2019s really not that difficult. And, worst case, which I was able to achieve, you\u2019ll have a nice bread pie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was delicious in its own mutant, blunder-riddled way. 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