Tortillas? Pita pockets? No sweat.

Pick a peck of perfect pockets

Soft and fluffy herb and cheese bread? You got it. Hot cross buns? No problemo.

One-a-penny, two-a-penny, yawn.

Scrolls stuffed with spicy pear and ginger?

A delicious pushover

Roast capsicum and feta pull-apart? You got it.

Impressive, yet simple

Slow-rise crusty bread, oh-so-perfect for dipping in fresh olive oil from the press at the farmer’s market? Baby, I wrote the book.

Mouth-wateringly easy

But there is a holy grail in homemade bread. The simple and sturdy sandwich bread. The kind of bread you can slap around the outside of a pile of pickles and cheese and tomatoes and turn what would otherwise be a messy and anti-social, palm-squelching affair into the culmination of Western culture, the sandwich. But it’s not easy: commercial bakeries have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to make a bread with a fine crumb, consistent strenght and a firm-but-not-crunchy crust — tricks like lecithin and added gluten and newt eyeballs. And, let’s face it, you can buy sandwich bread anywhere. You can get it at petrol stations. So the standard is set pretty high: not only does your homemade stuff have to match theirs, with all their Evil Big Bakery Wizardry, but it has to also be simple enough to offset any potential “but you can buy bread!” comments. As with home-made clothes, there’s an established bar to cross before people stop staring at your weirdly high-waisted jeans, sniggering cruelly and grinding your efforts into the dust. (I’ve been hanging out with a rough crowd.) I think of it as an invisibility standard: when your efforts are indistinguishable from what your average joe expects to be able to buy, you’re on the right path. And then you BLAST ‘EM OUT OF THE WATER WITH YOUR GENIUS!

Where was I? Oh yes, sandwich bread. So, like I illustrated above, I can totally make bread. But making good sandwich bread is a whole new barrel of chipmunks: there are particular requirements placed on it and the fact that you eat it a bajillion times per week means any problems are not ignorable. You’ve got to do it right, or every mouthful of sandwich will be as ashes and dick. M is a pro at it, and so I made him teach me. And lo, the light of the goddess of bread entered me roughly from behind and showed me the path to true bread glory.

I held off blogging about this until I could be sure. I’ve got three loaves under my belt now, each better than the previous, and now I feel like saying it out loud: babies, I can make sandwich bread.

Behold.

This one is half white flour, half wholemeal, but I have had equal success with half white and half rye, so, y’know: am awesome.

It's normal to feel a little jealous.

The key is to have a dough way wetter than you think proper — you should be worrying about it being too wet. It should be so wet that it’s messy to work with (I’m trying to crank up my Google hits here). M pointed out to me that he knew my dough was too dry because I was enjoying kneading it. And kneading: lots of pulling and stretching, less brute force. Folding rather than punching-down. And a little resty-poo for the dough after every handling. I use a little melted butter and plain yoghurt in the dough, too, for flayva — I do admit sometimes I’m a little light-handed with the salt: but you’d be upset if I was too perfect. And then you’d stop reading the blog, and then you’d miss me and have to come crawling back and make a spectacle of yourself and…well, nobody needs that kind of indignity around here.

Yes. A thousand times, yes.

This is my Woodstock.

Note: Oven still dead. This is pure reminiscience.

Well, in addition to slow-roasted vegetables which were turned into slow-simmered soup, I was doing some other slow-moving cookery.  Namely, I woke up my sourdough starter, Pongo, and fired him up.  There are two cooking streams feeding into this:

Firstly: Since we’ve been living in a share house with some family, I’ve kept Pongo in the fridge, which drastically slows the rate of yeast development in the starter and slows the need for feeding.  So yesterday I pulled Pongo out of the fridge and fed him up, developing the foam and robustness that indicates a healthy yeast colony. He responded really quickly, indicating that the yeasts were alive, awake, and rearing to make bread (or beer, I suppose).

Secondly: M and I have been talking about dispensing with our electric bread-maker.  We use it for kneading and rising, and M pointed out that if we could do those things by hand, we could get rid of yet another unnecessary Thing in our lives. To that end, he’s been developing some pretty l33t sk1llz in kneading and shaping by hand (rising just tends to happen naturally).  I learned from the best, and he showed me how best to knead a Pongo-based bread, teaching me how a hand-kneaded dough feels and responds when it comes together and the glutens start to develop.  So before breakfast, this was underway:

A hand-kneaded, wholemeal sourdough dough.  The ingredients: wholemeal flour, warm water, sourdough starter (i.e. Pongo) and a pinch of salt. A little elbow-grease was followed by a lot of waiting. I mean, nearly all day. Sourdough starters are much slower to get going than dried yeast, which is how the sour flavour develops through the dough.  In fact, this dough was sluggish enough that I worried it wasn’t going to come together at all.  I shouldn’t have doubted Pongo: the last two or three hours of rising saw an exponential BOOM in volume, as the dough suddenly swelled up in that way that excites all home bread-makers. Into the pre-heated, cast iron pot it went.

Sweet Zombie Jesus, I have never had a Pongo loaf come out this fantastic. I can hardly believe how richly-flavoured and delicious this stuff is. This is a really good picture: it accurately shows off the crumb and the thickness of the crust.  What it doesn’t show is the divinely rich, mature, tangy flavour of the wholemeal bread.  I am seriously in love with this stuff, and expect it will make up a significant part of my diet over the week.  I had fond hopes that this dough would come through for me: I didn’t realise it would come out this good.  And it is very, very good (needs a hint more salt). I’m so happy. Pongo is on the rebound, having been fed and responding with a rush of fermentation and growth: he’s happy too.  We might just make some more bread later this week.  Depends how far this one gets us…

Bread-making is still a bit of a novelty to me. M’s a pro at it, for which I am terribly grateful, but I don’t mind dallying.  I love how dough rises, too. I mix up my doughs in the breadmaker, which does an excellent job on mixing and kneading, and then taking them out after they’ve finished rising. I took the picture on the left after just a few moments after I lifted the tin out of the breadmaker, following an hour or two of rising, and it was lifting well out of the tin. It has flopped down a little while I got the camera ready, but it’s fine.  Dough is far more robust then you’d think it would be.

And then I prepared to fill it with all manner of tasty treats: chopped feta, sliced roast red capsicum (when I go to Heaven, every fridge will have a crisper full of fresh red caspsicums, and I will spend the first week of my time there roasting them in fresh olive oil. You’ll see.), chopped kalamata olives, which had been marinading in chilli flakes and oil, and some finely chopped shallots.  Oh yes, yes, yes.

So I popped the oven on to heat, and rolled the dough out onto a floured board.  This works as a lazy-girl punch down, too.  Then I covered half of the dough in fillings, sliced the uncovered half into strips, kind of radiating away from the fillings, and wrapped it over:

And then it was time to let it rise a little more.  I’m normally pretty slack with baking and often don’t rise things a second time (shhh), but I thought all the fillings in the middle would weigh the dough down a little, so I thought I’d give the yeast a head start before baking.  I don’t know why I thought that made sense, but let’s soldier on.

Anyway, half an hour of rising later, I popped Mr Bread into the oven and cooked.  It took a while, but I thought it would.  I took the time to give my hair a dye while I waited (not pictured).

…

And here is Mr Bread!

So crusty and fresh-looking.

Om nom nom nom nom. I have eaten much of this bread, and it is delicious.  Magically delicious.