Oh, I Knead You, Baby

One of the worst trends ever to be foisted upon the American consciousness is the lo-carb, no-carb Atkins nonsense.  Besides being entirely contrary to tens of thousands of years of nutritional evolution in humans, the whole no-carb craze has one completely fatal flaw.  BREAD IS AWESOME.  I have a co-worker whose doctor suggested to her that she stop eating wheat and gluten products because she might be allergic.  My response to that?  "Well, you just need to tell that doctor to go to Hell."  If I had to choose between eating bread and dying from an allergic reaction or not eating bread and living until the age of 150, I’d be calling up funeral homes.  Life without bread is not a life worth living.  Celiac Disease be damned.

You see, there are few things in this world better than bread.  Now, I’m not talking about your standard grocery store bread, but real, honest-to-goodness, made by hand bread.  (As a side note: know how to tell if you have good bread or not?  Is your bread sold in a plastic bag?  If the answer to that question is yes, then it’s not good bread.  It’s that simple!)  I spent my life eating mass-produced bread.  I know better than anyone what that spongy, slimy mess tastes (or more accurately, doesn’t taste) like.  I grew up thinking that the way to tell if a loaf of bread was fresh was to squeeze it.

I know that I was not alone in such an upbringing.  Many of us were.  And we can’t blame our mothers.  My mom had quite enough on her hands, thank you very much, without having to worry about making fresh, homemade bread three times a week for her family.  (Which is too bad, because my mom’s homemade bread was pretty good most of the time.)  For a while, I used to bake bread regularly, and I loved the final product.  I did not, however, love the bread making process.  Hours and hours of kneading, forming loaves, punching down, re-kneading…It’s just so not worth it.

Well, I came across this recipe from the New York Times website recently, and figured I’d give it a try.  I’d seen something similar on the best food TV show in the world, Good Eats, and figured if it was good enough for AB, it was good enough for me.  You don’t have to knead the dough at all, which is great, but you do have to let it rise for 12-18 hours.  I had started my dough this morning at 9AM.  I figured I would let it rise for 12 hours, then bake it off late at night, and have it cooled down and ready to eat by morning.

There were a couple of problems with this train of thought:

1. Yes, you have to let it rest for 12 hours, but then you have to form the dough into a ball and let it rise another 2 hours.  Apparently, in addition to being unable to read my own writing for typos and grammatical errors, I’m incapable of reading a recipe thoroughly.

2. Letting bread sit for 12 hours would not be a problem for me if I didn’t have a tendency to be a) easily distracted and b) forgetful.  So, when 11:00 rolled around, I wandered into the kitchen to get a drink before bed and noticed a whole bowl of bread dough that had been rising since 9AM.  Oops.

So, it’s now 11:47, and I’ve got a loaf of bread rising on the stove.  The oven is preheating to 450 degrees, and at midnight, I’m going to put the somewhat incompletely risen loaf of bread in the oven to bake for 30 minutes.  This just goes to show you how much I love bread.  I will be baking a loaf at 12:30 with the full knowledge that I didn’t follow the recipe and that it probably won’t turn out well.  Ah well.  C’est la vie, eh?

Besides, what better midnight snack than a piping hot loaf of (probably too dense) bread slathered with real butter and a heaping tablespoon of homemade peach jam.  Suck it, Cheetos!

I’ll let y’all know how it turned out…but probably not until tomorrow.