Here is the original Pin
The Pin promised four loaves of french bread for $1.00 in about an hour. Perfect! I LOVE fresh bread, so making my own in under an hour would be amazing! My younger two were napping, and I had (at least) an hour to spare! So I head to the cabinets and get all the paraphernalia together to get this yumminess going.
Ingredients:
2 1/2c warm water
2 tbs yeast
2 tbs sugar
2 tbs white vinegar
1 tbs salt
1/3c oil
6-7c flour (or more if it's too soft)
That was the ingredients list from the blog that the pin links too. Okay, here's the problem. What she doesn't say until you read the comments under the post on her blog that you need to use INSTANT YEAST. I unknowingly got Active Yeast. I didn't know that until I was half way into the recipe. Thought I'd put that out there..umm..NOW. *Pet Peeve* If you're going to write a recipe out on the internet for others to use, maybe you should consider putting in all the knitty gritty details...just sayin'. Anyway..
Here's my steps in photo/caption form. :)
My ingredients. I used olive oil (orange container), it's what I normally cook with. You can use any oil I presume..
Step 1
Combine warm water, yeast (INSTANT), sugar and white vinegar into your mixing bowl. Now this kind of confused me. Maybe I'm an idiot..but I didn't know if I was supposed to mix it up, or just combine the ingredients in the bowl...I ended up mixing them. Anyway, you wait for the mixture to start bubbling (claimed to be 3-5m wait)
this photograph is from before I actually mixed it up
Step 2
Add salt, oil and flour, one cup at a time while mixing. Okay..sounds good...recipe calls for 5-6 cups..umm..mine was still really sticky/soft at 6c..So I ended up adding more like 7 cups.
This was after just the 6 cups..wayyy to soft
Step 3
Kneed dough for 3-5 minutes. Honestly, this was one of the most difficult steps. Maybe my dough was still too soft? But I made a GIANT mess of my hands and called it good after 2 minutes or so. After you kneed the dough the recipe calls for you to put the dough (in the bowl) in the oven (I presume the oven is off, because it doesn't say otherwise) with a sauce pot of boiling water. Apparently, the dough should rise and you should punch it back down when this happens. It should be in there for 3-5m. Yeah, that didn't happen. I put it in the oven with the water for close to 10m and it didn't look like it rose at all.
Step 4
Form into loaves and place on a greased cookie sheet sprinkled with cornmeal. I, who like most read an ingredients list and make sure I have those items on hand when attempting a recipe, was unaware that there was cornmeal needed for this recipe (because it WASN'T on the ingredients list!). So I just sprinkled flour over the greased cookie sheet and called it good. Once you get your loaves formed cut 3-5 slits on top and cover with some egg wash (a beated egg-which lucky for me I have eggs on hand 24/7, because again, it wasn't on the ingredients list).
Step 5
Put the pan in the oven set at 170 and let the dough rise. Once it's risen enough just turn the oven up to 375 and let it cook. The actual recipe didn't really give a time it just said until it was done. Ohhhkayyy... Mine was in the oven for approximately 20m.
I honestly didn't know if the yeast was going to work because I wasn't sure if I jacked up the recipe-but it rose, and it worked!
And here it is 20 minutes later. :)
Verdict: eh. It's okay. The kids really like it. I think I'm more of a yeast bread person. It's a fairly easy recipe, and it took closer to 2 hours start to finish..but I was also stopping to take photographs through out the way. OH and I want to add-I got 2 decent sized loaves out of the recipe. If you tried for 4 (like the pin promised), they'd be pretty small.
Total Cost: pennies. I had everything but the yeast on hand. The whole jar of yeast cost me $3, and I only used 2 tablespoons.
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