Great to go with soups or stews!
Submitted by: Cari Moisan
Ingredients
- 4 cups (512 g) unbleached all-purpose or bread flour
- 2 teaspoons (10 g) kosher salt
- 2 cups (454 g) lukewarm water (made by mixing 1.5 cups cold water with 0.5 cup boiling water)
- 2 teaspoons (8 g) sugar
- 2 teaspoons (8 g) instant yeast, I love SAF Instant Yeast, see notes below
- room temperature butter, about 2 tablespoons
Instructions: Preheat the oven to 425ºF
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, sugar, and instant yeast (I love SAF Instant Yeast). Add the water. Mix until the flour is absorbed. (If you are using active dry yeast, see notes below.)
Let it rise. Cover bowl with a tea towel or plastic wrap and set aside in a warm spot to rise for at least an hour. (In the winter or if you are letting the bread rise in a cool place, it might take as long as two hours to rise.) - Grease two 1-qt or 1.5-qt oven-safe bowls with about a tablespoon of butter each. Using two forks, punch down your dough, scraping it from the sides of the bowl, which it will be clinging to. As you scrape it down try to pull the dough toward the center. You want to loosen the dough entirely from the sides of the bowl, and you want to make sure you have punched it down.
- Take your two forks and divide the dough into two equal portions — eye the center of the dough, and starting from the center and working out, pull the dough apart with the two forks. Then scoop up each half and place into your prepared bowls.
- Let the dough rise again for about 20 to 30 minutes on the countertop near the oven (or near a warm spot) or until it has risen to just below or above (depending on what size bowl you are using) the top of the bowls. (Note: Do not do the warm-oven trick for the second rise, and do not cover your bowls for the second rise. Simply set your bowls on top of your oven, so that they are in a warm spot.)
- Keeping the dough in the prepared bowls, bake them for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375º and bake for 15 to 17 minutes longer. Remove from the oven and turn the loaves onto cooling racks. If you have greased the bowls well, the loaves should fall right out onto the cooling racks. If the loaves look a little pale and soft when you have turned them out onto your cooling racks, place the loaves into the oven (outside of their bowls) and let them bake for about 5 minutes longer. Remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes before cutting.
Note:
How to create a slightly warm spot for your bread to rise in: Turn the oven on at any temperature (350ºF or so) for one minute, then turn it off. Note: Do not allow the oven to get up to 300ºF, for example, and then heat at that setting for 1 minute — this will be too hot. Just let the oven preheat for a total of 1 minute — it likely will not get above 100ºF. The goal is to just create a slightly warm environment for the bread.