Baking bread

I decided to do something very silly, that is, very new to me and not something I ever thought I'd want to do. I decided to try to bake a "real" loaf of bread. I've made lots of quick-breads in the past, but they don't keep and don't really work for sandwiches.

So here I am. I managed to keep the kitchen mostly under control after I deep cleaned all the surfaces on Saturday. I decided to do a crock pot artisan loaf, just because it sounds neat. Dan had mentioned it several times, and I wouldn't be at the mercy of my slightly unpredictable oven. It tends to burn things, even when I follow directions. My crock pot, on the other hand, has been behaving itself particularly well. (This is amazingly easy and delicious. I used a chuck roast and made stock with the bones and trimmings. Then a couple days later I made chili using the stock as my liquid. Mmm.)

I started by whipping up a batch of this dough. At first I wasn't sure if I'd have quite enough flour for the big batch, which will make 4 loaves. It also took me a minute to find a container big enough to hold the dough as it rose. Luckily I remembered the gigantic metal bowl we bought ages ago. Here is how it looked when I set it on the oven to rise:

Covered in cling wrap

I used cooler water than I probably needed to; I wanted to use filtered water and I just nuked it for about 20 seconds to get it to room temperature or so. Therefore, I decided I would need to let it rise for about 3 hours, instead of 2. Here is how it looked after 90 minutes:

A little condensation; not much growth

And after several more hours, since it was taking its sweet time to rise (it was cold in my house):

Doubled in size? Close enough.

Then it was ready to be put in the fridge for later (3/4 of it) and formed into a loaf and put in the crock pot (1/4 of it).

For the fridge. Another 2-3 loaves in there, woo!

My cute little 1 lb lump of dough

The neat part about this recipe is that you don't have to wait for the dough to rise a second time. You just pop it in the crock pot and it rises there. Here it is after about 15 minutes on high:

Plumping!

The recipe said to start checking on the loaf around the 45 minute mark, so that's what I set my timer for. Here's how it looked:

Not quite there yet

It was just barely starting to crisp up on the bottom, but the top was nowhere near done. I set the timer for another 15 minutes. Also, it smelled AMAZING. After the 15 was up, I checked again and it looked more done, but not totally done. I poked at the top and it bubbled at me a little bit. It was like it was alive. Weird. So I left it for another 5, after which it looked like this:

Smells. So. Good.

You can see that there is a little bit of color starting around the sides, but the middle of the top is all bubbles and goo. I left it for another 5 minutes, with the same results. I set the timer for 10 after that, and got my baking sheet ready for the broiler. The top finally seemed firm enough, but when I took it out of the crock pot I felt that the bottom crust was not quite crispy enough, so I set the timer for another 10 minutes. When it went off, that was a total of 90 minutes in the slow cooker. Next time, now that I sort of "know" my slow cooker, I'm going to wait until the 70 minute mark to check it the first time, and go in 10 minute increments after that. I think all the opening and closing of the crock pot was making things take longer. I just didn't want to burn it. Oh well. Now I know. Here's the bottom crust at the 90 minute mark:

And we're popping it in the oven. 5 minutes on broil on the middle rack. I conveniently forgot that my oven tends to burn things...should have checked at the 3 minute mark, I think. It still came out pretty well, though.

Hello gorgeous.

By this time it was nearly 11 at night. The bread needed to cool completely before I could cut into it, so I can't show it to you sliced just yet. Plus, I can't tell you how it tasted. It smelled like heaven, though. I'll post next week about how it came out. (I'll comment below with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, though, as soon as I can.)