bread

One reason I was excited to move into our New York apartment was because we'd have a full-size oven! Which meant that I could bake so much more than just cookies in our little toaster oven! So I decided to try baking some bread. We were also trying to save some money, so I thought it would be great if we never had to buy sandwich bread ever again.

It turns out that bread is harder to make than I thought! The first couple loaves came out like bricks, and they were pretty hard to eat. So I gave up.

But THEN, Cyrus got me the item at the top of my birthday list: a Dutch oven. After having read a bunch of food blogs for the past couple years, I realized how useful this thing could be, and how limited I felt without one. So after experimenting with a couple recipes with the Dutch oven (the galbi jjim and coq au vin both came out beautifully!) I decided to try Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe.

I also decided to give dry active yeast a rest and use instant yeast instead. (Maybe something was wrong with my yeast?) Anyway, the recipe worked! The bread really tasted like something you might buy at a store. I used cornmeal to sprinkle onto the crust before I baked it, and it filled the entire apartment with the smell of popcorn! Heavenly!

Anyway, I have a total bread fixation now. Cyrus loves rosemary, so this next recipe caught my eye: I will attempt America's Test Kitchen's rosemary foccacia! (More about how much I love America's Test Kitchen later.)