Saturday, December 3, 2011

Italian Supermarket Bread

I have been baking for more than 10 years now. But baking became a stress buster after having kids about 6+ years now. My baking experiments seldom fail. But I had a big time baking failure today. I was attempting to make two kinds of cookies but was making them low-fat using non-hydrogenated soft buttery spread instead of butter. They tasted fine, but spread too much due to buttermilk in the buttery spread. I usually replace part of butter with it, but today was one of those days where I was over ambitious and decided to replace the entire butter with the spread. So, here is a bread that I baked last week, but had not posted instead of the cookies.
One year back - Holiday Gift Ideas
Two years back - Yam and Apple Kofta Curry
Adapted from - King Arthur Flour
Ingredients:
All purpose flour - 4 Cups
Dry milk - 1/4 cup
Salt - 2 tsp
Sugar - 2 tsp
Water - 1 1/3 cup (Warm)
Instant Yeast - 2 tsp
Olive Oil - 3 TBSP

Method:
Refer to the link given above to make by hand. I placed all the ingredients into the pan of the bread machine and started it on dough cycle. When the cycle completes, take it out and divide into two parts. It is a very sticky dough. Flour the surface and your hands while shaping. Shape each half into a baguette. Let it rest for an hour and then slash and bake at 400 F for 25 minutes. Remove the baked loaves from the oven and place them back on the oven rack leaving the oven door propped open to make the crust crispy.
I used this to make crostini which, I served with Caponata.

Today being the third day of the month long Bake-A-Thon (3 down, 28 more to go), check out what my fellow bake-a-thon ladies are baking -
Susan of The WellSeasoned Cook,
Preethi of IsingCakes,
Veena Krishna Kumar of VeenasVegnation,
Priya Suresh of Priya's Easy N Tasty Recipes.

Enjoy.

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9 comments:

  1. I tried making this one and it tasted awesome. very crusty and perfect with soups.

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  2. This looks so homely.I have always dreaded baking breads Champa..not sure why...this post makes me try one.

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  3. Would love to have with some tomatoes and cheese topped as bruschetta with this bread..Looks fabulous.

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  4. wow!!!looks so perfect...have never tried this yet,,,bookmarked??????oh yeah definitely

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  5. As if supermarket bread could be this fine. ; ) It's very rare to get good commercial yeast bread; I can recommend only one brand, but I wouldn't choose it over this crusty and fragrant loaf.

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  6. The bread looks great Champa. I too had one such experience with cookies. They turned out flat like athirsams.

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