This has been my first week in the kitchen and I am happy to announce that it has been a success. Who would have thought that cooking for 20 people with different intolerances, allergies and eating styles was not so difficult after all? At least I didn’t. But it is tremendously rewarding to cook for this community and of course having Tulja’s help has made a big difference in the cooking. I find this way of bringing people from the community together and at the same time offering variety in the meals tremendously interesting. At the same time, we learn about different foods: gluten and gluten-free, lactose and lactose-free, plant-based and organic. How to look for them, where to buy them, what are the differences between them…
Later we will have time to talk about it more in depth, but today I am going to talk about one of my favorite foods: bread. And to share with you a simple formula that will allow you to have fresh bread whenever you want.
I have used it to make normal bread, with gluten, although there is no problem if you want to use an oat flour for example without gluten for it. It is relatively simple and if we follow the steps we can have fresh bread every day, and without kneading! So let’s get to it.
The first thing we have to do is to take a small glass jar, it can be recycled, of chickpeas or sauces. In it we are going to put water and flour in equal parts. It doesn’t matter the quantity although I recommend to put 30 grams of water and the same of flour to start with. And we leave it out of the refrigerator and covered. The next day, to this mixture, add another 30 grams of flour and 30 grams of water, and repeat. You must do it 2 times a day. And again we leave it covered outside the refrigerator.
In this way, after only two days we have the base to start making our first bread!
To do this, we take a bowl and with a small weight we measure the quantities of the ingredients we need. We put 375 grams of water, 80 grams of dough from our jar of flour and water, 500 grams of flour, 10 grams of salt and half an envelope more (approximately) of yeast.
Mix everything well in the bowl until you have a homogeneous dough and let it rest, covered with a cloth, outside the refrigerator for 50 minutes. After this time we put water in our hands and move the dough, grabbing it on one side and taking that side towards the center, thus introducing air inside the dough. And repeat this 4 more times, every half hour.
Once we have done that, we cover it and leave it in the fridge to rest until the next day and… voila! We only have to put the dough in the oven for an hour at 180 degrees to have our fresh bread! And the best part? We still have our base of flour and water in the jar, to which we add a little more flour and water 2 times a day during a week, and then only 1 time a day the second week to continue to grow and continue to take whenever we need. After these two weeks we´ve got the perfect mixture and we will not need to add yeast when we make our bread. and we must put it in the fridge if we want it to keep as it should. Then just add more water and yeast at least once a week, and the process will continue.
It is simply perfect and (almost) infinite!
