Free Inquiry: Baking Bread

This weeks adventure: Bread!

This week I deviated slightly from my original plan, as I felt as though I wasn’t being challenged enough by some of the recipes I had chosen. At the beginning of quarantine when everyone jumped on the sourdough bread train, I decided I would too. This didn’t last long though, as I became incredibly uninterested in it and was unwilling to spend every few hours doing new twisting, turning, or flipping of the bread! To be honest, I never even got a loaf of bread out of the process. I created a starter and tried to keep it alive, but after accidentally neglecting it for too long, it died… along with my interest in making sourdough!

Last week as I was scrolling on TikTok (a bad habit I need to break) I came across what seemed to me as the easiest bread recipe – and by easy, I mean this looked dead easy. With that being said, I was skeptical, because why would people put SO much time and energy into baking bread if it could be this simple?! I decided that I would try this bread out for my vegan baking experiment this week, with the full expectation that it wouldn’t turn out well. So, let me take you through this process and show you the result!

This recipe only consists of mixing together flour, water, salt, and yeast, and then just letting it sit for a long long time. One of its selling points is that it is “no knead.” I followed the TikTok recipe, but apparently it was based off of this Recipe. In looking at this recipe, I think my end product may have turned out better having had a bit more instruction than a short TikTok could offer. One of the key points of the recipe that the full version states, is that the dough should rise in a warm environment, and if it isn’t in one, then it may need up to 24hrs to rise – something which was not stated in the TikTok I watched. One of the biggest problems I had with my bread was that it was quite flat, likely because my dough was not in a warm environment and I only left it to rise for 16 hrs.

This first image is what it looked like when I was about to put it into the oven:

The second and third images are of the final product:

Overall, this bread was definitely super easy to make, but I wish that I had the more detailed instructions when I was making it! I really wanted to bake bread as it is usually a naturally vegan food that people don’t even think about being vegan, thus making it an amazing staple food to have in your home to share with others (& who doesn’t love the smell of freshly baked bread?!). Even though this recipe was easy, it felt more daunting than anything else I’ve tried, just because I felt as though it could fail so easily! I will now have to try out the full recipe to see how it compares to this one!

Anyways, I highly suggest anyone else give this a go too if you’re looking for a bread recipe. So far, this is the simplest one I have found, and with some tweaking, I could totally see it becoming a staple.

Bye for now, 

Jaime