free-for-all bread

That is what the bread I made last night should be called, it was that easy, and seemingly that indestructible (read, I did whatever I wanted and it still turned out ok). We had homemade split pea soup for dinner last night, and the perfect accompaniment to that is a crusty homemade loaf of bread. This is my go-to recipe for easy, tasty, perfect-for-dunking-in-soup bread, but it had been so long since I last made it I forgot it has to rise overnight, so I had to move on to plan B if I wanted to have bread with dinner. That is when I stumbled upon this recipe. It seemed easy enough, and forming it into a baguette seemed like a fun alternative, so I decided to give it a whirl. And I am definitely glad I did, it was just as easy as promised.

I got together my ingredients and set out with the best intentions to follow SK's instructions. It wasn't long however before I had to improvise. For starters, I did not have either "stone-ground wheat flour" or  "coarse ground whole wheat flour," I had only "white whole wheat flour." So I opted to use a little more "white wheat" than all purpose and for good measure I used a quarter cup of wheat germ instead of tablesppon to make it taste, and be, a little "healthier," and besides, SK promised you could not break this bread...

I stirred em all up in a bowl then let the KitchenAid do the hard part...

...but that didn't work out quite as well as I expected, so I dumped it out and started kneading by hand. (Note, at this point I was not very optimistic about how this bread was going to turn out, at no point did it have a very elastic texture. Also note it is very hard to knead dough with one hand, while taking a pic with the other- I do not recommend it.)

Once I had what seemed like a smooth ball of dough, I floured it up, and put it back in the bowl (not a warm one, like advised) and covered it with a towel. Here again, I decided to stray from the directions. SK says to place in a cool, draft-free place- I set the oven to 350 and let the bread rise in there (simply because our house was around 55 degrees yesterday). Not sure if the bread would have turned out better if I left-out that step (maybe 55 degrees is a good "cool" temp for bread), but I let the bread sit in the oven for 5 hours (I turned it off once it pre-heated) before I kneaded it again and let it to a quick second rise. I think I let it sit for an hour before I took it out, kneaded it again, and rolled it into a baguette shape. I didn't get any pics of the shaping process, but check out the original post on SK if you want step by step instructions on how to form a baguette. At this point in the process, I was quite skeptical of the outcome, as I felt I barely followed the instructions, but I had nothing to lose by baking it, so in it went...

I baked it at 450 for 30 minutes and then turned the temp down and ended up baking it for maybe another 3, it was getting a little too done on the top for my liking (in the future I might start it at 425 so I can bake it a little longer, the center wasn't quite done enough, and the bottom was definitely too done... it had to be cut off).

I've decided I need a little practice with my baguette rolling, the seam in the bottom got a little unruly, but over all it was a good first attempt at this recipe. I will be trying it out again in the future when I want some homemade bread with my soup and don't have time to let the dough rest for 12-18 hours.