Homemade Bread

Now that I've mastered chiffon cakes, I thought I'd give my family a little respite from all the cakes and turn to... BREAD! There is nothing like fresh bread, straight out of the oven. I refuse to use the bread maker because it seems like the lazy man's method and I want to to fancy bread - with roasted garlic or olives.

A few months ago, while hooked on the Food Network, I watched this show called "Chef Academy" starring Jean Novelli. In Season 1, episode 4, he showed the students how to make bread and he stuffed Camembert inside with sundried tomatoes. God, it looked delicious and I drooled, just thinking how good it must have tasted.

I finally looked it up online and found the recipe: http://www.bravotv.com/foodies/recipes/whole-baked-camembert

You can put anything inside the bread so I'm really only going to follow his instructions and ingredients for his basic bread dough. Here is the recipe:

Basic Bread Dough
1 lb Strong flour (this is about 3 1/2 cups)
2 teaspoons Salt
1 oz unsalted Butter (= 2 tablespoons)
2 teaspoons Action Bread Yeast (available from most food stores)
1/2 qt warm water (made from 1 part boiling, 1 part chilled) 1/2 qt = 2 cups
1 pinch of sugar

1. In a large bowl mix together the flour, salt, butter and yeast.

2. Stir in the water and mix into a soft dough.

3. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead well for 10 minutes by hand or 5 in an electric mixer with a fitted dough hook.

4. Shape the dough into a ball and place in a floured bowl. Cover with damp cloth and leave in a warm place until doubled in size.

just before the oven

5. Once doubled turn out onto the table and gently press out the excess gas from the dough.

6. Knead a couple of times to smooth out the dough. Divide into 2.

7. Roll each piece out 1 times bigger than the cheese.

8. Preheat the oven to 450F, Gas Mark 8.

9. Place the cheese in the centre and fold over the dough adding some of the ingredients from the marinade.

10. Turn over onto a floured baking sheet so as the folds are on the base. Brush the top with olive and finish with sprigs of thyme, bay leaves cumin seeds, salt and pepper and finish with a dusting of flour.

the final result

11. Allow to double in double in size before baking in a pre-heated oven for 25-30 minutes. Spray with an atomizer before placing in the oven and again 5 minutes before the end of cooking.

12. Remove to a large serving board and allow to cool before serving.

Good luck to me! I'm making it for the first time tonight with some homemade chicken soup.

Update: March 23, 2011
Well, I made this bread on March 17th. Used all purpose flour instead of bread flour but they turned out pretty good. All the photos that you see in this blog so far are from that batch. I put brie in some, and some sundried tomato soft cheese in others. Sprigs of rosemary in all. The photos don't make them look very large, but they were pretty big. Mom couldn't eat a whole one.

Yesterday I made it again, but I figured I'd try it with the whole wheat bread flour that was in the house. The dough was pretty sticky so maybe whole wheat bread requires more flour. Hmm. Something to research before my next batch. In any event, the bread turned out pretty well. All of them were smaller than the first attempt. I didn't use rosemary as much. Lots of garlic. My nephew, Calvin, made me proud as that was the only thing he'd eat for dinner. heh heh. The bread itself once baked felt heavy and I'm not sure if that was because they weren't fully cooked (some of them weren't totally all the way through) or because I had stuffed them with filler.

I wouldn't mind trying this as a pizza dough. Or filling with tomato, sausage and some green pepper to make homemade calzones.