Relatively easy-to-make crusty peasant loaf

One of my favorite features of writing here on Rhosgobel has always been my "recipe blogging of the week" posts.  Through that little feature my SO and I have posted more than 110 different recipes. While I make no promises about continuing to post one recipe a week, I am happy to return to recipe blogging with the following bread recipe.

While I've always enjoyed baking bread, the amount of work entailed in making a good loaf relegated  bread baking to days when I had lots of free time.  My favorite artisan bread baking book is Hamelman's "Bread"; it has incredibly detailed recipes and descriptions of techniques that allowed me to make a few loaves of delicious ciabatta.  However, said ciabatta also took me much work across two days, and thus my SO and I found ourselves frequenting our local bakery whenever we wanted bread.

That all changed when a friend introduced me to a new book, "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day".  I was extremely skeptical at first, as I'm always suspicious of recipes, books, and cooks that promise that home-cooked, old-world taste in two minutes flat ("and $20 off if you order in the next 5 minutes!"¹). However, after a few failed attempts, I was able to modify the technique introduced in the book to make a surprisingly good peasant loaf with a minimal amount of work.   Here's the basic outline of the technique:

1. Mix the ingredients in a large container and allow to rise for three hours at room temperature.
2. Put the risen dough in the fridge, and refrigerate at least overnight, though it can hold for up to two or three weeks.
3. Take the dough out of the fridge, pull out as much dough as you want to use that day, roughly shape it, and let it rise for about two hours (folding it after the first 20 minutes).
4. Bake for ~40 minutes, and let cool until ready to eat.

While I'd hardly call it "bread in five minutes", the ability to have risen bread dough ready to go in the fridge has enabled me to bake bread virtually any day I want it.  Whenever I finish up one batch of dough, I immediately start another; my SO and I almost never buy artisan bread anymore.  So, if you're looking for a crusty loaf of bread that has a chewy, wheaty interior and yet doesn't take a tremendous amount of work to make, you might want to give this a try.

Bread ingredients:
3 cups water, ~100F
1 1/2 tablespoons active dry yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
32.5 ounces (~6 1/4 cups) unbleached white flour
1/3 cup wheat germ

Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

My SO and I love moist, chewy cookies. We were thus ecstatic when we found this recipe, which makes huge cookies (they're about 3 1/2" in diameter and about 3/4" thick) that stay moist and chewy for days after cooking. Since we've gotten rave reviews of these from friends recently, they're this week's first end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar, packed
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
2 tablespoons milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

0. Soften the butter (by letting it sit out at room temperature for a while), and preheat your oven to 375F.
1. Cream the butter, peanut butter, sugar, and brown sugar together in a large bowl (we use our stand mixer) until it is as smooth as it will get with the peanut chunks in it.
2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition.
3. Mix in the corn syrup, milk, and vanilla.
4. Mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a bowl.
5. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, mixing until well combined.
6. Add the chocolate chips, mixing until just combined.
7. Measure out 1/4 cup chunks of dough and place onto a cookie sheet. We use a silicone cookie sheet liner to make removing the cookies easier after baking; you may want to grease your cookie sheets if you don't have a liner.
8. Bake for 13 minutes at 375F, or until the cookies are turning brown at the edges. They may appear slightly underbaked; this is OK, as they'll continue cooking a bit outside the oven (though test various cooking times to see what best suits your oven and tastes).
9. Let rest on the cookie sheet (out of the oven) for a minute or so, then remove the cookies to a rack to cool completely.

Notes:

If you want smoother cookies, use non-chunky peanut butter. We use the standard variety peanut butter that's been salted and sugared, but this is almost certainly flexible.

Based on a recipe by Kathy Bliesner from Allrecipes.com.

Bliesner, Kathy. "Chewy Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies" http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Chewy-Peanut-Butter-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/Detail.aspx. Accessed April 2003.

Apricot scones

While we were in London my SO and I did a lot of cooking, partially because my SO was sick for a week and wasn't in any shape to go anywhere, and partially because we enjoy cooking and wanted to avoid paying for meals at all the expensive London restaurants. However, my SO's brother's kitchen was rather small, and also rather under-equipped (in fairness to him, the apartment came with only limited cooking supplies and he doesn't have much time to cook), so we weren't able to make a lot of our usual dishes.

One dish we did make three times, however, was apricot scones, so they seem like a perfect end-of-the-week recipe blogging post. We hadn't intended on making the scones three times, but by the end of our trip we realized that we had the cream, butter, and apricots necessary to make them, and thus if we didn't make them the ingredients would just go bad.

These scones are relatively easy to make (less than half an hour from start to finish), and they store and reheat well. If you've never had scones, they're basically a sweet biscuit made with cream; they're quite moist and flavorful right out of the oven. As my SO's brother and I like to say, "The secret ingredient is fat."

2 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold butter, unsalted, cut into pieces
1/2 cup dried apricots, cut into small pieces
1 large egg
1/2 cup heavy cream

0. Preheat the oven to 425F.
1. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt together in a large mixing bowl.
2. Add the cold butter to the flour and mix with either a fork, a pair of knives, your fingers, or (preferably) a pastry blender until the butter is well distributed through the flour, being careful not to melt the butter. I typically work the mixture until most of the butter is in very small bits (like coarse sand), with the largest butter clumps no larger than peas.
3. Add the chopped apricots and mix well.
4. Mix the cream and egg together in a small bowl, add to the flour/butter mixture, and mix until reasonably well combined. The dough will likely not be entirely cohesive (there will probably be some dry mix at the bottom of the bowl and a few large clumps), but if the mixture is not holding together well at all you can add a bit more cream.
5. Knead the dough in the bowl or on the countertop a number of times (I usually do around 10 kneads) to complete the dough mixing and get a single cohesive mass of dough.
6. Roll the dough out on the counter until it is approximately 3/4-inch thick. The dough is usually soft enough that I just press it out with the palm of my hand.
7. Cut the dough into approximately eight to twelve pieces, place on a cookie sheet, and bake until the tops are browned, ~12-15 minutes. If desired, you can brush the tops of the scones with milk and sprinkle them with sugar before putting them in the oven, but I usually don't do this.
8. Serve the scones immediately, with plenty of butter or jam.

Notes:

Virtually any dried fruit will work well in place of the apricots, such as blueberries or currants, though our favorite alternate is probably dried cherries.

One variant of this recipe we enjoy is blueberry almond scones. To make these, add 1/3 cup of dried blueberries and 1/3 cup of slivered almonds in place of the apricots (in step 3), doing everything else as described above. The almonds add a pleasing crunch, and would go well with most dried fruits.

To store the scones we let them cool to room temperature and then wrap them in plastic wrap or put them in leftover containers and leave them at room temperature. To reheat the scones we put them in a 350F oven for approximately 10 minutes, or until they're heated through.

Reference:

Rombauer, I. S., M. R. Becker, and E. Becker. 1997. Joy of Cooking. Scribner, NY.

[Update July 2007: Added blueberry almond variant.]