Bread

My son reported on a failed attempt to make bread. This got me to send him my tried and trusted recipe, which is very similar to a recipe given by Mark Bittman on his cooking site for no-knead bread (the video is available on YouTube).

Basically it's two cups flour, one cup hot water, 1 tablespoon oil, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp sugar, 2 tsp dried yeast, mixed together to form a slightly sticky, wet dough. You cover this in its bowl with a warm damp cloth, let it rise in a warm area for an hour, then either turn it onto a baking sheet dusted with flour and shape it into a loaf shape, or turn it into a baking tin greased and floured, and bake for 1 hour at 180 degrees Celsius, or deep fry small portions for that wonderful SA snack, vetkoek! This gives a bread with a chewy crust, similar to ciabatta, and can be varied by the kind of flour used, or putting in raisins, seeds or even fried onions and cheese folded into the middle.

However, I have found that the success varies with the altitude, the flour (hard or soft wheat) and the oven, so you do need to experiment by adding more or less water, and baking for a longer or shorter time, or even giving it a longer proving time.

But it also made me think about bread generally - the many varieties, the most basic being simply flour and water kneaded together, then baked over a fire, to the complexity of a really good sourdough bread, where the process can take weeks from the moment of getting your starter dough going until your final loaf.

The chemistry of bread is also quite complex, but the final product is almost always great - the yeasty smell of freshly baked bread, the taste of that loaf with some butter and coffee or just the use of good bread in a cheese sandwich must surely rank as one of the most satisfying meals in the world.

No wonder we think of it as the staff of life.