Bread

For my birthday, Nell bought me eight bags of flour, a cheese cloth, and a pan for longer style breads. Not surprisingly, I've been doing some baking recently. I had never used a pan like the one I got, so the first thing I made was a baguette.

The recipe I used was very simple, just flour, water, salt, and yeast. It was fairly good even though it was mostly just an experiment to see how the pan worked. The loaf was a slightly misshapen and the crumb was a little more dense than I would have liked, but it was still very tasty. With more practice at shaping dough, and maybe some extra water and a longer rise time, and I'll be making some great bread.

The first loaf wasn't going to last long so Nell and I had to eat it right away. Also, we wanted something that we could use to make sandwiches for lunches. Consequently, for my second attempt I made a square loaf.

The density of the first loaf was perfect for sandwich bread. So I used the same recipe that I used for the long loaf, but I added some olive oil to the mixture so that it would stay soft longer. The square loaf turned out exactly as I thought it would and made some great sandwiches. The only alteration I might make to this recipe is I might add a little sugar to get a darker crust.