Bread

[spacebug]

I heard the authors of this book on The Splendid Table about a few weeks ago. I love fresh bread. Who doesn't love fresh bread? But, being busy and often hungry, I exist pretty regularly on fast foods. Not like, McDonalds and crap, but just fast snack stuff like pita and hummus and cheese and crackers and mixed nuts and sandwiches and foods that generally don't take a long time to prepare, even though I like to cook.

We got this book on Saturday. Since then, I've all but exhausted the flour and yeast I happened to have in the house, which I think was a good portion of a 5lb bag. I think we've made at least six loaves of bread. Really awesome, fresh, crispy-crust, not too dense, imminently snackable bread. And it was super easy. As we ate fresh baked baguettes with our soup last night, S4 turned to me and said "I think this book just might change our lives." I made a pair of small baguettes before work the other morning, and ate half of one, fresh and warm with apple butter, for breakfast. So. Awesome. I made a sandwich with the other half for lunch. I snacked on half of the second when I got home from work. S4 made the remaining half into a sandwich for dinner. Fresh bread makes all the fast, snacky foods I tend to exist on a million times yummier.

If I have one complaint, it's that the chapter on pastry doughs relies so much on eggs. I'd love to be able to make fresh pastries as easily as the bread, but dislike eggs. Any of you vegan cooks have a good pastry dough recipe?


On an unrelated note, I think my office has a severe infestation of paper-jam gremlins.

Comments

[pygmybugs.livejournal.com]

You might ask my sister. Even though she's all gluten-free, now, she used to rock quite a few tasty vegan baked things. Maybe she has a recipe.

Baking has never been my forte, but I got really good at making vegan cornbread when I worked at the T-Rock. Fresh bread is the awesome, though. I kinda wish that disaster didn't occur every time I touched anything other than the simplest quickbreads. (A good portion of it is my complete unwillingness to measure anything correctly -- I'm very much a "pinch and handfull" kinda cook.)