Bread of the Month: The Bread

For this month I decided to go with a recipe just posted on The Pioneer Woman Cooks. Her friend, Pastor Ryan, made it for her. Apparently he just calls it "The Bread". Which is just fine, because this bread is fantastic enough to have a name like that. (Kinda like Cher or Madonna. This bread is just "Bread". Or "Mr. Bread" to you.)

Just as the recipe says, I dumped all of the ingredients in my Kitchenaid and let that wonderful machine do all the work. Oddly, the dough kept separating while it was kneaded. Weird.


I let it knead the dough for a long, long time. Long enough for me to surf the web for a while. And then realize that my two most favorite household items were together on the counter. I *heart* my laptop and Kitchenaid mixer!


Is that the pregnancy insanity kicking in? Whatever.

So I kept trying to knead it long enough for the "window pane" effect (see the recipe for an explanation), but even after 15 minutes it wasn't there.


Meh. Whatever.

I decided it was ready for a good, long raise. Oh, I could have made it all pretty, letting it raise on the counter covered with flour, just as Pastor Ryan did. But that makes a mess, which is something I do not need. So it went where all of my dough goes:


in the mixer bowl, on the stove, covered in an old (but clean!) dish towel.

After a couple of hours the dough had at least doubled in size. Pretty.


By the way, my fresh herbs of choice for the bread were thyme and rosemary. Mmm...

I don't have a fancy Le Creuset dutch oven like the Pioneer Woman. (But oh, how I wish I did. This one, in fact. Just in case you had an extra $200 you wanted to spend on me.)

But I do have this wonderful oven-proof casserole, which works just as well in this situation. So I slathered it in olive oil and plunked the dough in.


Then I sliced the dough to make it all pretty and drizzled it with more olive oil and sprinkled it with kosher salt to make it all yummy.


On a random note, look at this cute little pot I've started putting my kosher salt in. I rediscovered it the other day and am so pleased with myself. :) (I think my mom bought it in England at some point and I inherited it.)


Anywho, on went the lid and in went the dough into a 450 degree oven.


Around 45 minutes later this beautiful loaf came out.


Oh mercy, it smelled good. The fear of third degree burns on my tongue was all that kept me from tearing into that bad boy right then.

I let it cool on a wire rack and then sliced the loaf.


Soooo very good. Soooo very yummy. The flavor was fantastic, but what really got me was the crispy, salty crust. Man alive.


I decided to have an all Pioneer woman meal and served the bread with baked lemon pasta (heavenly!) and roasted ricotta tomatoes (oh baby!).


What a meal. I'm seriously considering this as my last meal before the baby comes. (More on that later.) The kids turned their noses up at everything but the bread, but they do that no matter what I make, so I'm not particularly offended.

But back to the bread. Oh, The Bread.

The verdict? This will definitely become a staple in the Madsen kitchen.