Observations about the universe, life, Lausanne and me

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Lazy man's loaf

Making your own bread is fun, but also work, which can give you unfortunate allergic reactions if you are as lazy as me. Fortunately, there is a way to make bread that takes a long time, but is almost no work at all, because you are forcing tiny slaves to do your work for you.

You'll need:
  • Three cups of flour (white all-purpose, or something more exotic)
  • 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast (Your tiny slaves, muhahaha!)
  • 1 1/2 teaspoon of salt
  • Water
  • Stuff
Here, stuff can be anything you want to have in or on your bread. You can also be boring and not use stuff, but then your tiny slaves will laugh at you, although you'll get your revenge when you kill them all off after they have done their work.

Take all your ingredients and throw them in a bowl. Mix a bit. It will look awful, especially if you've used colourful stuff. Below, I used 80g of greek olives, chopped, and two heaped teaspoons of olive paste as stuff (since greek olives are quite salty, I left out the salt altogether). Consequently, the dough looks like somebody puked into it. Don't worry, that is normal, although if you have room-mates you might want to check with them.

Puke. Or dough. Could be both.

Cover the bowl, and kick it into a corner. Forget it for 12-20 hours. Let your slaves do the work. Call them names if it amuses you. Afterwards, it will look even worse:

Seriously. That could be anything.

Grab the sticky mass, lift it out and put some flour and different stuff in the bowl. Here I've used some pumpkin seeds, which go well with olives. You can also use sesame, porridge or licorice lozenges. Put the dough back in, and throw it around until it gets vaguely loaf-shaped. You could also do this on a work surface, but then you'd have to clean it, stupid.
Loaf-shaped p.. you get the idea.

Cover the bowl again and let it rest for another two hours or so. It'll double in size, and try to eat you. To prevent your premature death by loaf, preheat your oven (setting "scorching"). If you have a pizza-stone put it in, if not a cast-iron pan will work as well. If you have neither, I fart in your general direction, but I guess the loaf will bake naked as well.
 
Stand in front of your oven and open the door. Then poke the dough - first it will deform: at this point it is not very elastic, then it will lunge at you and try to kill you for disturbing it's rest. Skip aside, and it will land into the blazingly hot pan. Shake the pan a bit to spread it out a bit, and to listen to it's agonising screams. Then put the cover on the pan (use aluminium foil if you don't have one) and bake for thirty minutes. Remove the cover, and gaze in satisfaction at your dead adversary. Bake for ten to fifteen minutes more, until you are happy with the colour of the crust. (If you love black, stop before you are happy. As you are already emo enough, you don't need your loaf to reflect the abyss that is your inner despair. Trust me on this.)

...a great many voices cried out in terror before being suddenly silenced.


Et voilà! Total time of preparation: 14 to 20 hours. Actual time spent doing something: about five minutes. Yeast germs killed: about a gazillion. My kind of bread.


Pumpkin-seed olive loaf
Sesame loaf

3 comments:

  1. I don't bake my own bread (or, to be honest, do most of the cooking) but I laughed all through your recipe. Does it taste good or just sound funny?

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  2. In a word: scrumptious.
    I've put on the second batch of olive bread yesterday. Oh, and you can keep the dough two or three days in the fridge, so you can make enough for two loafs at once, which cuts down on the work even more!

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