Bread! Bread!! BREAD!!!

Where do I begin? How about with Harmony. When I was visiting her last month she told me that she had begun baking bread. My head snapped up, jaw dropped and something along the lines of "what?" popped out of my mouth. You see, Harmony does not cook, or bake* (she has a fabulous hubby to do that for her) (*apparently Harmony is the baker in her family, sorry Harmony!) so I was surprised that she had tackled something as fussy as baking bread WITHOUT a bread machine. Then she told me how easy it was and walked me through it and sent me THIS LINK while we were sitting on the couch. I actually remembered seeing this article in Mother Earth News when it hit our mailbox, but dismissed it as another, "they make it sound easy, but it's really not" type of things.

Well, let me tell you folks, it IS easy and I can prove it. Here are the complete step-by-step instructions for you to make your own homemade bread too. I have been baking bread on an almost daily basis now and my family adores me for it. I ordered the book too, it's wonderful, from HERE.

All you need are these 4 ingredients, sea salt, flour, yeast and warm water. Yup, that's it!

Then you use the 6-3-3-13 method (you can 1/2 this recipe). 6 cups of warm water, 3 tablespoons of yeast (all three packets shown below)…

 Stir…

Add 3 tablespoons sea salt & stir (I should note here that my family thought the bread was too salty for their liking on my first batch so I have since cut back to 2 tablespoons sea salt and it still works great!)…

Then add any combination of 13 cups of flour that you desire. I have made loaves with white, whole wheat and oatmeal flours in a variety of combinations, they were all wonderful. However, I usually do 9 cups of whole wheat and 4 cups of all purpose white flour. I mainly use organic flours…

 Stir…

 Here is where I give in and just mix it with my hands, messy, but works well…

 It will look something like this. Let it sit on the counter for 2 hours…

 After 2 hours it will look like this…

Cover loosely and put it in the frig. I am using the insert of my crock pot for a bread bowl. It was the only container I had that was big enough and did not have a tight fitting cover. For more info on this, read the instructions HERE.

Let it sit in the frig for anywhere from 2 hours to 2 weeks (yes, 2 weeks!) and it is ready to bake. Prepare a pizza paddle with a bit of cornmeal so the dough doesn't stick…

 Use a serrated knife to cut off about 1/4 of the dough (approximately grapefruit size)…

 Form it into a loaf (you may need to flour your hands first as it is sticky)…

 After you form your loaf, put it on the cornmeal, sprinkle it with flour and let it sit for 40 minutes…

Heat your oven to 450 with a pizza stone on a middle rack and a broiler pan (just the bottom part) on the rack below it. Before you bake it, score it with a serrated knife (the sprinkled flour helps with this process)…

Once your oven is at 450, pour 1 cup of boiling water into the broiler pan (I heat this in the microwave) and slide your dough onto the pizza stone, in just 30 minutes you will have this…

YUM, YUM, YUM, super easy, super delicious, super healthy, NO yucky stuff like fillers, preservatives, sugars, corn syrup or partially hydrogenated anything!!!!

Now, what did I do with the rest of the dough that I didn't bake? It stayed in the crock pot and went back in the frig and will become bread or cinnamon rolls or pizza crust tomorrow and beyond. SO very easy. I am a busy gal and if I can make this work, anyone can. Try it and let me know how you do. The link again to Mother Earth News is HERE. The link for the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day website is HERE.

Go, get off the computer and make some bread dough, you probably already have the ingredients! Teresa

I promise, this is not a paid advertisement. :) I just love the bread!