Epic adventurer - Bread - Every day fresh loaf for one

One of the things I'd like to be able to enjoy on my planned epic River Murray adventure, is fresh bread.

I can make bread due to a previous enjoyed "Thing", but I cant make a small loaf for one on an open fire. Or at least I couldn't until today.

Every couple of years I get to hang out with two of the most interesting people I know, and at some point each time, we try to make bread on a camp fire.

It almost works a bit.

Sometimes.

Almost.

But not quite.

They tend toward atemptedbread made with chocolate, marshmallows, and M&Ms.

I tend toward trying to talk them out of it.

Sadly, and most enjoyably, neither approach seems to work better than the other.

In fact, I think the only loaf to have worked so far was an M&M/marshmallow concoction that tasted a bit like a bee rolled in flour might.

With this in mind I thought I should try a stack of different approaches to try to make a functional camp loaf for one.

I think I succeeded, and found a half decent way to make a reliable mini-loaf that can be easily made over an open fire.

I started with some salt.

Salt is really, really important. You really cant make bread without it. If you try, what you get is glue.

I'm making a small loaf so I'm using a small amount of salt.

Exactly one small amount.




I also added a small amount of sugar. Perhaps a 1/4 of a teaspoon.

I add some flour.

Around a third of a cup.

Next time I do this I will try a half a cup, because the loaf didn't quite fill my container.

And some water.

Also around a third of a cup.

And this much dry yeast.

I mixed it with the spoon handle in a way that I thought looked a bit like an automatic bread maker doing it's thing.

Basically I gripped the spoon in my fist, and forced the dough around a small bowl in a circular manner until it seemed a bit like dough.







I went with a very wet dough that I would only mix with a stick (in this case a spoon handle) rather than needing to knead. Kneading is way too tricky in a world without kitchen benches, and everything made in a camp kitchen, needs to be made in a single bowl to be practical.

Stir it like crazy, and it will work a treat.

I covered it with some plastic wrap, and waited until it doubled in size.

"Doubled in size" is a thing you hear a lot when your'e learning to make bread.









It's a very difficult thing to gauge. In my experence  most people (me included) tend to wait far too long, and end up having their loaf rise way too much. The best way to get the hang of this doubling business, is to leave the dough to rise in a tall thin container. Perhaps something like a spaghetti jar, or a measuring jug.  In a tall thin container, the only way for the dough to go is up, and as a result, it's very easy to see when a loaf has doubled in size.

Trying to determine when a loaf has doubled in size in a normal bowl is very hit and miss.

I quite like hit and miss, but if you want a good loaf, use a tall thin container to check the loaf has risen to double it's volume before you move to the next step.

Anyway...

After the correct amount of wait, the dough has risen what looks like only a tiny bit.

This tiny bit is really double it's original volume.

A cup 1cm wider than a different cup has a MUCH greater volume.

Doubled in volume looks like "a bit wider, and a bit taller"

If you can notice the dough is bigger, it's probably doubled.

Next, I rubbed butter all over the surfaces that the dough would come in contact with.

This cooking ... thing is something that's been in my family since I was a toddler.

I don't know what it's called, but I'm guessing the world knows it as a "waffle iron" or something like that.





It's normal use is to cook stuff between two slices of bread, buttered on the outside to stop sticking and burning.  Filling's include stuff with cheese, cheese, and more cheese.

I added the once risen dough, and searched around for a warm spot to set it for it's final rise.

The best spot is always a place that is wasting heat. In my home that's the wireless router.

It's always just lurking there bleeding heat out into the universe.

There always seem to be a lot of wires in the proximity of wireless things. And there always seems to be a lot of wasted heat as well.

Useful heat.



Bread rising heat.

It looked like this when it had doubled in volume again.

Most of the visual doubling is due to my moving the camera closer, but really, this has risen a lot.

Although It's possible I got the photo's around the wrong way.

Just remember that doubling in volume doesn't look like much has happened.



If it looks like a lot has happened, it's probably too much.

So now it's time to cook the thing.

It looked like this after a few minutes.

And this after a few more.













It sounded hollow when it was tapped, so I figured it was probably cooked.

It looked like this when it was cut in half, and it tasted just like bread.

A totally successful method of creating a mini loaf for one on an open fire.

The openness of my un-open fire is obviously something I'll need to deal with, but with a bit of practice, this system will definitely work in the real world on a real open fire.




I'm calling this a total success, and over the next few months, I'll be perfecting this method to the point where I can rely on my ability to make a perfect(ish) fresh mini-loaf of bread every day with only minimal effort.

Next time we make camp bread, we might actually get to eat some.

Perhaps now, the haunting, ethereal voice I heard at the last camp, wafting over the bread/chocolate/marshmallow smoke filled site, and endlessly in my nightmares, ...

"Dont pay attention to [Bullwinkle]"
"He knows nothing"
"He doesn't care"

Can finally be put to rest.

The next time I share a camp-site with these young bakers will see real M&M, marshmallow, and chocolate bread, baked in the waffle irons they forced their parents to buy.

It will be a truly great day for bee flavoured bread.




120 Things in 20 years - Reinventing ancient technology again and again in spite

Bread - Knot roll

I made this, and quite like the look of it.

It's a small, knot, slightly sweet(ish) dinner roll.

It's my first knot roll.











120 Things in 20 years - I eat a lot of bread these days

Bread - Sour dough with cheese starter success

My fake sour dough made with cheese starter actually worked.

I doubt it ever would have risen without the packet yeast, but the flavour was interesting.

It was also interesting that the texture of the dough was so different. I have no idea if it was because it was made with curds and whey, or if that's that's just a feature of something else I did that I have no idea about.

Many things baffle me.

But the loaf worked and tasted great.

Due to my temperamental camera (It's either not focusing properly, or missing altogether lately) I managed to completely fail to get pictures, but heres a "just in time" effort of the loaf.

I don't know why it was eaten from both ends like that. Perhaps someone found the crust particularly worthwhile, but at least I got a pic of the last slice.






120 Things in 20 years finds me in bed with a really bad cold, rather than dealing with my sour dough bread made with cheese starter successes.

Bread - Sourdough

So I thought I'd make some sourdough bread.

I looked some stuff up.

I discovered it had some lactobacillus in it.

That's what makes it sour.

I remembered from some earlier research, that that's the beastie that makes cheese, cheese.

Now normally you make sourdough by making a slurry of flour and water and waiting, then once it's been inoculated, you take half the slurry, and add it to your flour, and then re-feed the slurry with replacement flour and water. This way, you always have some alive and festering in the back of your fridge. That's called a sour dough starter.

There are apparently different kinds of beastie in different parts of the world, and thus, the traditional sourdoughs are different. even from village to village.

People and their marriages and social minglings are recorded in those peoples sourdough starters that fester in the backs of their fridges.

So because I dont know anyone with sourdough festering in the back of their fridge, but remembered I had some old cheese starter in the back of my own freezer, I thought I might try a shortcut.

I put some milk in a container with a little sugar and a little flour, then added a pinch of the cheese starter.

It's now halfway through it's first rising.

It looked really, really interesting when it was just a liquid.






120 Things in 20 years - Sourdough bread. My camera is stupid.

Bread - A recipe

3 2/3 cups bread making flour (sifted - it changes the weight if you don't sift it)

+An extra 1/3 a cup if needed (if the dough is too wet), and a bit for dusting your bench top surface when kneading.

1 1/2 cups warm milk ( 54 - room temperature - flour temperature (usually the same as the room temperature) = how warm the milk should be in degrees c)

1 egg yolk

1 1/2 teaspoons bakers yeast

1 teaspoon bread improver (just a product you can buy wherever you buy yeast)

1 teaspoon salt (minimum - I would add a little more perhaps and extra 1/2 tsp)

1 teaspoon sugar

=========================================================

I understand you should try to keep the pure salt away from the pure yeast as it can kill it. I'm not sure if it's true, but it's easy enough to make sure you mix the salt into your flour before you add yeast.

If you are trying to make this with a bread machine premix pack of flour, adding that much salt will make it disgusting because there is already things like salt, and bread improver in the premix stuff.

But you really need to buy a good quality bread making flour. All purpose flour is a compromise product to allow you to make something a bit like bread, or something a bit like cake.

Get bread making flour. It is such a different beast it should have a different name.

So...

Mix your warmed milk, sugar, and the yeast in a bowl. You may as well drop your egg and the oil in there as well.

Whisk it up a bit, then let it stand. After a few minutes, you should see some bubbles forming from the yeast. This step is called proofing, and I'm guessing it proves your yeast is still alive. My first few attempts turned out to be made with dead yeast, and failed completely.

Those times, I made glue.

Crunchy golden glue, but glue.

Now, fill a bowl with the dry ingredients, and mix them up a bit.

Make a well in the centre and, if you can see some bubbles forming, add the wet stuff. Or if you like to take risks, and trust your yeast is alive, add it anyway.

Mix it around for a bit until its a lumpy thing that you think you might be able to pull out of the bowl. At this point you may need to add up to an additional 1/3 cup of flour depending on how soft you dough  is. The flour picks up moisture from the air, so you cant really have a recipe that gets it right no matter what.

Now don't pull it out yet.

Let it sit for 15 - 20 minutes so that the flour absorbs some water. This should reduce the kneading time a bit.

Now pull it out, and knead it. The idea here is to stretch it without tearing it. Probably the easiest way to do this is to put it on a lightly floured surface, and with the palm of your hand, push the top half away from you, then turn it around a bit, fold it back on itself, and repeat.

For ages.

Until the consistency changes to a silky smooth texture.

It should be so silky and smooth, that you can stretch it out like a window and see through it without seeing and lumpy irregular bits. Like a really grubby window that you cant actually see through. Not really like a window at all. More like thin dough.

Here's a really poor photo of it. Poor, partly because my camera is having trouble focusing for some reason, partly because I'm not so good at kneading, and also because this was my hand model's first try (Thanks Mrs 120 Things in 20 years)

Everyone says kneading takes around 10 minutes, but mine seems to take 20. No doubt you get better at it, but as a beginner I knead for much longer than 10 minutes.

Knead it for at least 15 minutes.

Then jam it into a tall thing. Dont use a bowl, because you have to wait until it doubles in volume, and nobody has any idea how much bigger a lump of dough has to be to have doubled in volume. I think a cylinder doubles in volume with a 10 % increase in diameter or something, a sphere, something about 2/3rds of the same size cylinder, and an irregular spheroid of dough... who knows.

Use a straight sided thing.

I use a big plastic water jug that has volume marks on the side. You can lightly oil the sides if you feel like it. This loaf went in at 1L.

And came out at 2L.

It doesn't get much easier to judge than that.

Put it in a warm place (in my case on the cup warmer of an espresso machine) at around 25c to get it to rise quickly, but I'm told the longer it takes, the more flavour it will have.






Once it's doubled in volume, turn it out onto a lightly floured, clean, dry surface. Try not to tear it as you get it out. Give it time and it will probably come out on it's own. If not gently coax it out by sliding your hand or a stick up the side between the dough and the container.

Now spread it out a bit and knock all the air out of it. It's called punching, but it's pretty gentle. Not like the punching I see on TV. More like a massage.

Get all the big bubbles out of it, then shape it roughly into the shape you will want it in. In this case a roundish blob.

The big bubbles at this stage wont tun into some nice looking rustic holes in your bread. they will just swell up and flake the top of your crust off, or burn.






Dough likes a rest.

That doesn't really mean anything, but it makes it easier to shape it after it's had a little lie down. If you have just handled it a lot and try to, say, roll it into a long thin loaf, it will keep springing back into a shorter one.

So give it a rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

I divided this dough into two portions, and this loaf shown here uses around half this recipe, but it's a small loaf. All of it could easily be used for a single loaf.

Now form it into a ball by endlessly tucking the sides towards the bottom. The idea here is to create a smooth, tight, membrane on top. One good way to do this is to cup your hands around the dough, with your little fingers slightly under it, but with the dough resting on a table. Then gently pull the ball toward yourself by a half inch or so, this moves the side closest to you under the ball, and stretches the top. Then you rotate the ball slightly and repeat until you have the desired result.

Smooth, tight, membrane. This holds the loaf in shape and stops it from becoming a puddle. It also keeps the air in and make's it rise a bit better in the oven. The photo below shows a bit of a failure to make that nice thin membrane, because after I did my best, I patted the loaf flat with my hand.

Now place it into or onto whatever you are going to put into the oven with it. You don't want to have to pick the thing up to put into an oven. Experts can do it but I cant, and there's a fair chance that if you've read this far without being disgusted at my methods, you are also a beginner, and thus you cant either. I shaped mine into a flatter disk to stop it hitting the lid of the container I bake it in. But it get's quite delicate after it's final rise, and it's easy to ruin it with rough handling

I put my bread in a deep, non-stick frying pan with the handles removed. This thing also has a glass lid, so I can see what's going on, and hold some steam in.

Now leave it to rise until it doubles in volume. This is tricky and you just have to guess. I found the more I let it rise, the less it rises in the oven. But I'm basing that on a pretty small sample with every one being a different recipe, so try to ignore that.

But don't let it get too big.

Mine looked like this when I guessed it was ready for the oven.

I have no idea if that's double the volume. It's very deceiving.

But it's close.

The first ones I let rise until they were double the width and height. That's six times the volume or something crazy.



Next, it's time to wet the top surface of the loaf with water, slash it and add seeds.

I did that in the wrong order, but that's ok.

So I wet it, then did this with my razor bread slashing thing, or Lame.

Then this.













A very important thing to do to get that extra rise in the oven is to heat it from the bottom. Once again, this allows the rise before a crust if formed on the top. Once the crust forms, unless the loaf cracks open, it cant expand any more. I put a stack of cast iron stuff into my oven at the bottom to collect some heat and preheat my oven to flat out. That combined with having my loaf in a sealed container seems to do the trick pretty well.


Real bread ovens have the option to add steam when you first put the bread into the hot oven.

This stops a crust from forming too soon, and allows the bread to do a sudden extra rise in the first few minutes of being put in the oven. You can throw some water into your very hot oven to do the same, but risk burning yourself, breaking your glass door, and wrecking your electronics. If you cover your loaf, you can get a similar result because the bread puts out some steam of it's own. If it's sealed in, it can do the trick, but I also add a bit of water to the container just before it goes into the oven.


I also leave my oven flat out, and don't remove the lid during cooking. So my oven is at 250c the entire time and it takes around 20 minutes for rolls, and 30 minutes for a round loaf of around 225mm or 9 inches. My pan is only 10 inches wide, and it's all I've got so that's the biggest loaf I could do.

You can tell a loaf is done when it sounds hollow when you tap it.

Your oven will be different, so cook it 'till it's cooked.

It will look exactly like this when it's done.



















120 Things in 20 years - A bread recipe. I think I got most of that in the correct order.

Bread - "Lame" or bread slashing thing

A "lame" (pronounced in the first part of this), or "bread slashing thing" is a razor blade on a stick.

It's really important if you want to make those nice textured loaves that are slashed before baking, like baguettes.

I found a knife did a poor job, and I keep my knives sharp. The problem was their thickness rather than their sharpness. A scalpel worked a bit better, but was still too thick.

I thought I'd make one, and it worked really well. It's what I used on my last loaf, with the 5 overlapping cuts.

I started by wrecking a disposable razor. Safety glasses are important here, bits flew all over the place.

Really, really, really, sharp bits.

Wear glasses.

If you get a razor stuck in your eye, I bet it really stings every time you blink.

Wear glasses.

Next step was to trim it into a shape that I thought would work. My aim was to minimise friction as it cut into the loaf.

Scissors worked to shape the blade. The thin blades cut like thick paper.

The to make a handle, I cut the end off a chopstick...

And split it with a steak knife.

I made the split long enough to hold a decent amount of the blade.

And glued it in place with super glue.

It works really well.

I think the secret to the slashing bit is bold confident strokes.

Here's a picture of a totally unrelated ball of dough in a glass of water.
















120 Things in 20 years is all about boldness and confidence. And bread and a lame. And a glass of water with dough in it.

Bread - Scoring or slashing

There is a lot of different reasons given for why we slash bread before putting into the oven.

Many claims involve letting steam out.

I'm finding it almost imposable to tell truth from fiction, so I did a stack of tests for myself, and this is why I think it's done.

I made a loaf that ended up looking like this.

By far my best loaf to date.

It was bread by any standard.

In fact I wouldn't change anything if I wanted to make this style of light white bread.

Luckily for me, for the first time, I took detailed notes of the amounts and durations etc. so I actually have my first recipe.


I will eventually follow some recipes, but for this first stage I want to know why people used x amount of this and that, so I wanted to do the tests myself. I just enjoy exploring, even where it's already been explored. From everything I've read, it's all about very accurate measurements if you are trying to make a particular kind of bread.

I'm finding it pretty easy now to make bread, but I haven't yet tried to make a particular kind of bread.

No doubt that will be an entirely new challenge.

But this post is about slashing the bread with a razor just before putting it into the oven. And it really does need to be a razor. I found everything else pulls the bread and doesn't really cut it decisively, and it's done at just the wrong time to be being rough with the dough.

My loaf had to go into my container with a lid, and it had already risen to the point where, if it went up too much more in the oven it would touch the lid.

If I had left the bread un-slashed, it would rise pretty much equally in all directions. Probably a bit more out, than up because of gravity.

And probably an un-slashed loaf would rise a bit less overall because of having the restriction of its own outer skin.

If I had slashed the bread with a cut across the top (pictured left), I should expect the deepest part of the cut to burst up and become the topmost part of the finished loaf. The sides would "rise" sideways less because all the rising would go up.

What I did was to make 5 cuts around the outside.

I hadn't tried 5 overlapping cuts like this in any of my tests, and really wanted to test my conclusions of those tests.

I figured this should give me the desired result, a well "risen" loaf, but one that didn't go up too much.





I should also point out that the dough was also originally shaped so that it was a flatter wider disc, rather than a high ball, so not all the final shape was due to slashing.

But after the loaf was cut and put into the oven (250c preheated with 4 cast iron plates in the bottom), the first few minutes saw the loaf starting to change shape.

At first the top rose a bit, and the cuts opened out a little.

But within 5 minutes, the top had stopped doing a lot, but the bottom most point of each cut started to fold up, and out.

The top outside corners followed an arc that created all the sideways "rise".

At one stage there was a step where the top was flat, and the cuts formed 90 degree angles. It would have been a funny looking loaf if it had set in that shape, but the lid was on so there was lots of steam in the container, so the outer skin was still flexible enough to keep growing out.

The result was almost a perfect dome, with a continuous shape without any steps or obvious cuts, just different colour and texture to mark the history of it's unfolding.

It looked like this on the inside, and the first picture of the post, shows the interesting colour and textural variations on the crust...

The best part is that this is the first loaf that turned out exactly how I wanted it to. Some previous loaves have turned out bready enough, but I didn't really have an idea of what kind of thing I wanted to create. With this loaf, it's light and fluffy white bread like you might buy as a knot roll, and every single one of those slightly larger holes is in exactly the right place :)

Perfect (to my biased head).

I'll just double check the recipe before posting it, because I had to keep adding flour to my original mix and as a result, some of the flour was added later during the kneading. I don't think it was so late that it will make any difference, but I'm make it again with the final amounts so I don't lead anyone astray by posting a fluke recipe that cant be duplicated.





120 Things in 20 years scoring and slashing bread - I just noticed the pentagram I created (I was too busy seeing what looked to me like fish tails), and no, this post is not part of a secret coded Illuminati conspiracy message, so if you just add the word DELETE to the subject line of any emails, I can filter them straight to the junk folder. Everyone wins!

Bread - Loaf 5

I think this last loaf worked really well.

---------------
But first, a correction to the last post.

The bit that read...


I read somewhere that if you take the number 44, and subtract the room temperature in centigrade, you are left with the temperature the water should be. (presuming your flour is at room temperature)

Should have said,  "Take the number 54 and subtract the room temperature AND the flour temperature, and you are left with what the water temperature needs to be."

--------------

So...

This latest loaf, loaf number 5 worked really well. 

I think. 

I haven't tried it yet because I'm risking taking it to a friends house for a dinner party. 

It was made the same way as the last loaf except this time I preheated the oven properly with some cast iron the bottom to try to get some heat under the loaf.

The other difference was that I removed the plastic handle, and lid handle from a deep non-stick frying pan to act as a backing tray. This meant there was a much smaller gap between the dough and the cover (the last time I used a large bowl) , and as I result, I think I got more steam. 

I didn't add any water, but the dough contributes a bit as you can see, with the lid steaming up. 

This is after their final shaping, and after a few minutes of rising. 

This is what they looked like after their final rise, and just before slashing and being put into the oven.

This time I saw an extra rise in the oven for the first time. I'm not sure if it was because the loaf was in a container, and had nowhere to go but up, or if it was the steam, the hot iron at the base, or something I haven't understood yet. 

My 120 Things in 20 years loaf number 5 worked as well. Two in a row is a lot, lot better than one in a row. 

Bread - !

Bread - Success

I did make bread.

It wasn't perfect, but I've bought worse loaves from supermarkets.

The final product looked like this.













There were a few different steps I took from the last loaf I tried.


I read somewhere that if you take the number 44, and subtract the room temperature in centigrade, you are left with the temperature the water should be. (presuming your flour is at room temperature)

[Edit from the future - That should read "Take the number 54 and subtract the room temperature and the flour temperature. ]

It seemed to work. And I think I got a quicker rise as a result.




This time I just gently mixed around two cups of bread making flour with a cup of water and a few pinches of salt. I stirred it in a bowl for probably a minute or so until it looked like this.


I covered it and let it rest for 20 minutes.

I've read that this can save a bit of work as the flour absorbs the water by itself. I'm guessing this activates the yeast as well.

The next step was to kneed it and with this loaf, I flattened it out a bit and placed it back into the bowl.

The hole in the middle is where I stuck a spoon handle to see how deep it was so I could check later and better judge that it had doubled in size.

It's a bit tricky to tell, and I think I had previously let it more than double.

It only took 40 minutes to rise.


The kneading is very important to get right, because it causes the gluten in the flour to turn into long chains. These make the dough springy and stretchable. One way to tell if your dough is sufficiently kneaded, is to stretch out a window between your fingers. If its done, it doesn't break, and can be stretched to being see-through. This is important, because it's this stretchability that allows the carbon dioxide that the yeast create, to be trapped in little bubbles. Or big bubbles.

I'll show you the window thing when I can get my dough in good enough condition to do it.

So after it had doubled in size I shaped it by pulling the sides into the centre.

This creates a smooth membrane on the outside of the loaf on what will eventually be the top. This is also important, because it shapes how the loaf will rise.

Because it isn't going to be in a loaf pan, the only thing holding it together is the tightness of the outer skin.

I collected all the pulled in sides and made sure they were pinched together to stop the loaf splitting in a way I didn't want it to.

I think those tears are a fault, and indicate that I should have kneaded a bit longer.

The final step is to gently cup the loaf, and drag it slightly towards yourself to really stretch the top membrane.

It's a bit difficult to describe, but you use your little fingers to tuck in the bottom, as you pull it a centimetre or so towards yourself, then rotate it and do it again until the top is tight and smooth.

The drag from the counter on the bottom means that the top is stretched.

I then placed it on some baking paper and onto a cake cooling tray that will go with it into the oven.

I put it onto a dinner plate, covered it with an upturned bowl, and left it to do it's final rise on the coffee machines cup warmer.

I slashed it with a very sharp blade.

A razor is best.

But then realised I hadn't preheated the oven.

The slashing should be done just before entering the oven, but because I wanted to preheat the oven, this pic was taken a few minutes later, and you can see it has risen a bit more.




I cook my bread in a very, very old convection/microwave. The microwave bit is not used. I cant imagine what that would do, but I'm guessing the result would make nice shoes.

One of the problems with this tiny oven, is that it heats from above.

People who know this stuff use a clay baking tile in the bottom of their oven, and preheat it until it becomes really hot. This means when you put your bread onto it, the bottom is instantly given very high temperature, and it should start to cook from the bottom. This in turn allows the top to rise even more as it hasn't yet formed a crust. As soon as a crust forms the loaf cant expand unless there are cuts in the loaf, or unless the loaf tears.

I don't have a baking stone, so to try to get some heat under them I put some cast iron 1970's steak serving hotplate things in the oven.

Then I started freaking out because the loaf was still changing and starting to flatten out, so I put it into the oven even though it wasn't yet hot.

The result was the top cooked before the bottom so in the end, just before bringing it out I turned it over for a few minutes.

I cooked the loaf with the stainless steal bowl over the top and added some water to the cast iron things.

Bread making ovens have steamers to add water to the environment. This keeps the top from forming a crust and allows it to fully rise in the oven. The bowl and water can do a similar thing, and in my oven at least, the bowl also stops the top from burning.

After the first 20 minutes covered by the bowl, I cooked it for another 20 uncovered.

The first 20 minutes was at around 220c and the last at more like 180c.

The result was bread.

You can see in the top slice that there are some irregular lines. I think they were formed while I was shaping the loaf, and they are a little denser than the rest of the loaf.

But a close up reveals that it really is bread.

It looks like bread, feels like bread, smells like bread, and tastes like bread.














120 Things in 20 years - Success! I made bread!