Zucchini Bread

Ahem, it's obviously been awhile. The Farmer's Market is going well, the few times I've shown up. I've discovered the major downside to making bread for selling, especially in the summer, is that it leaves very little time for experimenting. So last week I decided that even though I was actually in town and didn't have to work I was going to skip the farmer's market and make bread for myself. I made zucchini bread and banana blueberry bread, both for the first time. I had forgotten how much fun it was to make bread for myself. Definitely something to keep doing. I'm saving the banana blueberry for another post but here's the zucchini bread.

Makes 2 loaves, at least

5 cups flour + more as needed
2 cups warm milk
2 eggs
1 large zucchini, grated
2 tbsp yeast
2-4 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil

get the yeast going with the milk, eggs and sugar
mix the flour and salt together, then add the zucchini. A note about the zucchini, leave the skin on but I deseeded mine before grating it. I discovered that the seeds don't grate well and I didn't want whole seeds in the bread.

The grated zucchini

Add in the yeast mixture when it's ready, pour some oil in and start kneading. You will need more flour. It varied the two times I made it, plus I was making lots of loaves. If you wanted less dough cut back on the milk. The first time I made it I used a mix of half whole wheat and half white, the second time I made it I used all white. I liked the whole wheat mix much better. It looks prettier with all white flour though, the green specks of the zucchini show up a lot better.

This is the dough with 1/2 whole wheat, 1/2 white

Once it's all ready give the dough a nice coat of oil and cover with a damp towel, let sit for an hour or so. Then punch it down and knead some more for a few minutes or until the dough starts to get really sticky. Let rest for a few minutes while you grease up the bread pans. Once the pans are ready divide up your dough accordingly into the pans, score if you'd like then cover with a damp towel again. Let sit for another hour.

Sometime during this hour preheat your oven to 425. When it's doubled in size put in the oven and bake at 425 for ten minutes. After ten minutes turn the oven down to 350, bake for another 25 minutes. At this point it may be done, it may need another 5-10 minutes. Once you think it's done pull out of the oven and let it sit in the pan for a few minutes. Gently tip them out of the pan and tap the bottom of the loaf. If the bottom is firm and sounds hollow when tapped on it's done. If the bottom has too much give put it back in the oven for a few minutes (I don't bother putting it back in the pan).  

A note:
This is not your traditional zucchini bread, as is likely apparent from the lack of cinnamon and spices and massive amounts of sugar in my recipe. Also it's yeasted, not a quick bread. It makes incredible sandwiches and I think it's very good but I did have a fair amount of disappointed people when they tried it because they couldn't get over zucchini bread needing to be a sweet, quick bread. The people who could try it with an open mind really enjoyed it though.

After baking the bread I made myself a breakfast with zucchini and scrambled eggs with some of my zucchini hot sauce and the zucchini bread on the side, quite easily one of the best meals I've made for myself in a long time.

Gluten Free Bread

I finally made gluten free bread the other day, I hadn't expected it to go well at all. I did some research online to find various recipes and tips for making it so I had some help going in. The recipe I started from is from Easy Gluten Free Baking and then I went from there altering the recipe according to tips I had read or what was available in my cupboards.

Recipe I ended up using:

Mix together well in a large bowl (I used a whisk for this part)
2 (generous) cups brown rice flour
1 cup tapicoa flour
1/2 cup dry milk
1 tbsp xanthan gum
1 tsp salt

In a smaller bowl get the yeast going with
1 tbsp yeast
1 3/4 cups warm milk
1/2 tbsp sugar

Once the yeast is ready combine with the flour mixture then add in
2 eggs (beaten and at room temp)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp mayo

beat with a spoon (too wet to knead well with the hands) until it's well mixed, then beat a little bit more as if you were kneading it. Since I couldn't get my hands in there it's hard for me to describe the dough but you want it wet. It was still thick like regular bread dough and stuck together well but was very close to being a batter instead of dough.

The dough right after I put it into the pan

 

Scrap into a greased bread pan, lightly oil a piece of saran wrap and loosely cover the dough. Let rise for an hour or so (should rise to just over the edge of the pan) then uncover and bake at 350 for about 50 minutes. It'll shrink again while it bakes, which I had expected, what I hadn't expected is that it would shrink almost back to it's original size.

fresh out of the oven

It ended up being much more solid than expected and also more sweet than expected. That might be because I used milk instead of water. I went with the milk because I didn't have enough dry milk but I did have lots of regular milk that needed to be used up before it went bad. Plus I figured if what replaces the structure the gluten provides is protein, the more protein the better, so milk instead of water would be better.  My first thought for improving the recipe is to increase the ingredients by 50% so that I would end up with a bigger loaf. I'm not sure if I would use milk instead of water again, I might just use water next time to see what the difference would be. It's not a bread I plan to make often (gluten free flour is expensive!) but I have definitely been convinced that gluten free bread can be tasty and I'm glad it's in my repertoire of bread making skills now.

The breads from soup night

Saturday we had soup night, something we've done a few times in the past where people bring soup and we have a party and eat yummy soup. This time I made a ton of bread to go with all the soup. Mostly I made bread bowls, but a few loaves as well. It was also a good experience for getting ready for the farmer's market. I split the bread making up into two days and I think I'll do that for the farmer's market as well. The day before I made the sourdough bread bowls because I've noticed that sourdough bread tastes better the next day. I also made spicy bread bowls. The jalapeno bread I made last month went over really well but I don't have a whole lot of jalapenos so I wanted to come up with a way to make spicy bread that wouldn't be so expensive or time consuming (pickling jalapenos is a process all it's own). So I went to my local co-op and bought some cayenne powder. It worked really well. My roommate also gave me some dried ghost pepper to use, which I did use half of one crumbled up. I used my normal bread recipe but just added into the flour a few good healthy shakes of the cayenne powder and the ground up dried ghost pepper. The powder worked much nicer than the jalapenos because it made the spice more even throughout the bread. With the jalapenos you would get the occasional bite that was way spicier than the rest. It was a very delayed heat too, it was almost universal that when people tried it their immediate reaction was to say it wasn't very spicy at all, a beat later go "oh there it is, yeah this does have a lot of kick to it!" It amused me at least, mostly because I had the same reaction too when I first tried it. I thought I had failed at making spicy bread at first, then the spice hit me.



My other big bread hit of the night was my bacon cheddar beer bread. I used Fat Tire for the beer (I promise I'll try another kind of beer one of these days) and fried up six thick slices of bacon (roughly chopped up) used almost a whole pound of sharp cheddar cheese (grated) and made some incredibly unhealthy but delicious bread. I used the grease from the bacon as well in place of the olive oil. In general, bacon fat in bread is very tasty. Before baking it I did rub some olive oil onto the top and then sprinkled with the remaining cheddar cheese. I made it into two bread bowls and one loaf, based on how fast it disappeared it will definitely be one of the breads I make for the farmer's market.

Bacon-cheddar beer bread

My personal favorite from the night was my tomato basil bread. I used a vodka sauce instead (I had half a jar already open in the fridge, figured I'd use it up) of the tomato basil sauce and added four leaves of fresh basil finely chopped up. It was amazingly good. I think it was the cream in the vodka sauce that added a lot to it. I make a pretty descent homemade vodka sauce for my pasta dishes that I think I might need to make for my bread sometime soon. Although the jar stuff is much cheaper than when I make it myself.

 Tomato basil bread bowls and loaf

The picture above shows my other recent discovery, personal pot pie tins make great pans for baking bread bowls. 

And last but not least of the breads I wanted to talk about, I made my apple cinnamon bread again with one improvement and as promised measurements for what I put on the inside. The improvement was that one of the apples I grated with the biggest side of the grater so that I ended up with small chunks of apple, the other I grated finely like I normally do where by the time I'm done it looks more like applesauce then grated apple. 

I lied, two improvements, from my experience making the challah and brioche bread I tried a half stick of butter melted into 1.5 cups of milk in place of oil and water. Will definitely do that again.

For the inside I did 1.5 tbsp of white sugar, 2.5 of brown sugar and 1.5 tbsp of cinnamon for each loaf. I also sprinkled a little cinnamon on top of the dough before baking it as well that I really liked. Made great french toast for the morning after the party. 

Right before rolling up the dough

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The finished loaves of apple cinnamon bread

Challah and Brioche breads

Yesterday was a very fun bread making day, I made a total of five loaves, including one monster loaf that really should have been two.

A friend of mine requested that I make challah bread (a traditional, eggy kind of Jewish bread) so that he could experiment with making stuffed french toast. I was promised stuffed french toast as payment for the bread, it seemed like a good deal to me. I looked up several recipes for challah bread, like any kind of bread it seems nobody can agree on exactly how to make it. So I complied a couple different ones and came up with this list of ingredients:

Ingredients for challah bread:

4 cups white flour
1/4 cup brown sugar (very approximate, recipes ranged from 1 tbsp to 1/2 cup, I erred on the generous side)
1 tsp salt
2 eggs
2 egg yolks (save the whites for egg wash)
1 cup warm water
1.5 tbsp of yeast
3-4 tbsp of olive oil (also just guessing that this is about as much as I used, you want a lot basically. One recipe even called for a 1/2 cup, much as I love olive oil that seemed a bit excessive)

Because of all the eggs it was very interesting to work with the dough, it was almost more pastry like rather than bread like. Just before baking it I mixed a splash of milk in with the egg whites to make an egg wash and brushed it all over the top of the dough.
When I punched down the dough it shrank quite a bit and didn't rise a whole lot for the second time after I put it in the pan (since we were going to be making french toast out of it I didn't think the traditional braid would be a good idea). So I was incredibly surprised when I opened the oven to check on it 35 minutes later and discovered it that it had more than doubled in size while baking. Next time I will not be deceived by it's small prebaked size, it'll go in two pans!

 It wasn't even to the top of the pan when it went in the oven!

The stuffed french toast (cream cheese, yogurt and raspberries for the stuffing) turned out well, the bread was hard to handle because of it's size and shape and we decided the stuffing could have used some sugar but it was still a pretty tasty breakfast. There will be more attempts.

The brioche was unplanned but very fun to make. It's basically the same as challah bread except it's french. I was talking to my roommate's grandmother (an awesome cook/baker) about breads and asked if there was any kind of bread I could make to send home with her. She said she had always wanted to try brioche bread and that she knew it was similar to challah bread but wasn't quite sure how. Turns out the only real difference is butter instead of oil. So to make brioche follow the same recipe above only add 3/4 cup softened (very softened I discovered!) butter in place of the olive oil and only 3/4 cups warm water instead of a whole cup. This time I did braid the bread, because it seemed like it'd be fun and I had never braided dough before. I divided the dough into six equal parts so I could make two braids (I wanted a loaf too after all). The hard part was getting the ends to stick together, they kept trying to pull apart. Once dough is separated it really doesn't like sticking together again. I let the braids rise for about 30-45 minutes before baking them. I also brushed them with the egg wash before baking. Total baking time was around 40 minutes at 350 on a pizza stone (they did not turn into monster braids, they only grew a normal amount in the oven). One of the loaves I did a very loose braid because I was worried about pulling on the dough too much, the second one I did quite a bit tighter and after baking them I think the loose braid looks much better. They taste the same of course but aesthetics do matter sometimes.

I also made two more loaves of my garlic pesto bread, but I've posted about them before. The only difference I tried this time is I found a jar in with the spices at the grocery store that was chopped garlic in olive oil with basil. It was pretty slick to be able to just dump the jar in rather than peeling and pressing a whole bulb of garlic like I usually do. More expensive of course but not too bad, it was around a $1.50 for the jar.

My morning of bread making

Tomato Basil

I actually made four loaves of tomato basil bread in two days. Slightly different, and better the second day.

Second day Ingredients:

5 cups white flour
1 tsp salt
4 cloves of garlic
1 egg (slightly beaten)
1/2 jar of Classico Tomato & Basil sauce
1 cup warm water
2 tbsp yeast
3-4 tbsp of olive oil


The biggest difference from day one to day two was that the first day I used half whole wheat flour and didn't have garlic. The whole wheat tasted good (of course) but it wasn't as red as I wanted it to be so the second day I used only white flour (I was also out of whole wheat) with the hope that it would take to the color of the sauce more. And it did. The second attempt was much more red, and very popular when I brought it to work. I did get the suggestion that next time I should try adding a little bit of finely chopped fresh basil as well to make the basil more noticeable, I think I'm going to do that next time.

I forgot to take a picture the second day so this is one of the loaves from the first day with the half whole wheat flour. The second one was a bit more red, mostly on the inside but the crust was more noticeably red as well when I only used white flour.

My Trip to Sioux Falls

A bit more of a delay in getting this post up than I thought there would be, but here it is.

Traveling with the dough actually worked really well. I'm not sure it would have worked out as well if the drive had been much longer but the 3.5 hour drive to Sioux Falls worked very well. My car was nice and toasty and I kept it covered with my sweatshirt to keep the wind from getting at it too much. Periodically I would make sure it wasn't trying to escape from the large ziplock bag it was in. The yeast might have been a bit too happy in my warm car surrounded by flour, apples, and sugar, it rose a lot.

Because I was going to be traveling with the dough I kept my recipe simple this time for my apple cinnamon bread. No eggs, no milk, nothing that could potentially spoil in a warm car.

Ingredients:

3 cups white flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 apples peeled and then grated
2 tbsp of yeast
2 cups warm water
2 tbsp of olive oil (I would probably use melted butter next time)
a few generous shakes of cinnamon

The grated apples with the flour

As usual I ended up having to add probably a cup or so at least of flour (I use the whole wheat for any extra flour I need), apples in particular add a lot of moisture to the dough, which I could have just used less water but I wanted enough dough for two loaves.

When the dough is ready to be shaped I roll it out to a little less than an inch thick and about as wide as my bread pan. Then I combine equal parts brown sugar and white sugar with a quite a bit of cinnamon. Combined it probably makes a 1/3 to 1/2 cup. Next time I'll try to remember to measure how much sugar I actually use. I spread the mixture all over the surface of the dough and then with my hands still covered in cinnamon and sugar I roll up the dough like a burrito and stick it in the bread pan and let it rise a second time before baking it. I like to do a little extra olive oil on top before baking to help it get a nice crust. Again I would probably try butter for this next time, I just like olive oil so much I don't usually even think about using anything else.

Bread turned out perfect and it was so great to be able to have fresh baked bread for my sister and her family without having to spend half my visit making it.

Taking my dough for a car ride

Yesterday I shaped my dough, placed them into their oiled pans, wrapped them in a towel and took them for a car ride. It worked out perfectly that I had about an hour drive so when I got to my destination I just popped the loaves into my friend's oven and 35 minutes later we had two perfect freshly baked loaves of bread.

Today I'm going to be trying a longer experiment with traveling dough. I'm going to my sister's but along the way I have a work call. So before I leave I'm going to mix the dough (no eggs or milk in it, just to be safe) put the towel over it and let it ride in my front seat for the 1.5 hour drive to my gig, punch down the dough and knead for awhile, then recover the dough and let it rise again in my car while I'm at work (about 3-4 hours) knead it some more to give the yeast some fresh air in the dough and then 2.5 hour drive to my sister's before it can be put in the fridge so that it can be baked in the morning.

I'll let everybody know how it goes when I come back from Sioux Falls!

A baking sort of day

I made 2 loaves of bread as well as 12 bolso today, feeling pretty good about it all but it really shows that I need to get my bread making endurance up before the farmer's market! Mostly I need to work on timing it all out so that bread is going in the oven as bread is coming out of the oven. It would help if I would just make several loaves of the same kind of bread instead of like today where I made three separate kinds of bread.

First I made Irish Soda Bread, this was partly because I had buttermilk that needed using, partly because I was low on yeast and mostly because I've only made soda bread once and I wanted to try my hand at it again. I modified a recipe I found from Simply Recipes.
Ingredients:
4 c white flour
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
4 tbsp shortening (I was out of butter)
1 egg
1 3/4 c buttermilk

For the most part I followed the directions, the main thing I did differently was to dissolve the soda in the buttermilk like I did the last time I made soda bread from a different recipe. And I didn't forget to write down the raisins in the ingredients, I'm not a fan of raisins in bread (or much in general) so I didn't put them in my bread. And I baked mine in a bread pan, not a skillet, and I didn't score it, although I meant to, just forgot.

Next I mixed up the dough for the bolso, regular bread recipe but because I needed to use up my eggs I decided to toss an egg in the dough as well which meant a little extra flour too.

While it was rising I started to mix together the ingredients for my sourdough. This time I tried a 1.5 cups of the starter, last time it didn't have quite a 'sour' enough taste for me. Also I didn't have any beer on hand so I just used water, so the only beer in this sourdough is in the starter. I did toss in a couple handfuls of shredded cheddar cheese though. I set it aside to rise, fed my starter and then made the filling up for my bolso bread.

I sliced up and 3/4 lb of sausage and tossed them all in a pan with a little bit of olive oil and let them cook completely while they were cooking I mixed up one egg and a pound of shredded mozzarella, when the sausage was done I added it into the egg cheese mix (oils from the pan and all) and mixed it all together thoroughly.  

Once the dough had doubled in size I punched it down and kneaded it for awhile on my floured table once it was ready to shape I split it up into 12 equal sized balls. Then one at a time I rolled them out and added a couple spoonfuls of the filling on one side, I folded the dough over the filling and using a fork pressed the edges to seal it together. Placed on a greased baking sheet and proceeded onto the next ball of dough.

Let them rise for about 20 minutes then coat with an egg wash (1 egg mixed with 2 tbsp of milk or water, I used milk). Bake at 350 for 40-45 minutes or until golden brown.

I was only able to bake eight at a time (four per cookie sheet) the other four I wrapped in tinfoil and put in the fridge to bake fresh later. They do get quite a bit bigger in the oven, so don't crowd them on the cookie sheet, before baking them it looks like you could maybe squeeze six on a sheet but don't do it. I ate one for lunch as soon as one cooled down enough to eat. Next time I would add tomato sauce to the inside and maybe some spice of some kind, they'd be really good with peppers inside too. They were still pretty tasty just as is though.

Next up the sourdough was ready to punch down and knead for awhile. It was done with it's second rising just as the bolso came out of the oven so that part worked out perfectly as well. Popped the sourdough in the oven and had my first long breather since I started the whole process, I spent the time wisely by talking to my sister on the phone. It took longer to bake then it has the past, a little over 45 minutes instead of the usual 40 minutes my bread takes. It came out looking good and I'll find out for sure when I try some at supper later tonight.

So things I learned today, bolso is fun but time consuming to make and next time I would add tomato sauce to the inside. And I need to work on my timing and endurance for bread making before June 8th.

Pumpernickel Bread

At Jeff's request I gave pumpernickel bread a try. It was interesting, my first time with rye flour and my first time with molasses. The dough was much more stiff than normal which scared me a little, I was worried my bread was going to come out too hard but it came out perfectly! A little lighter in color than I was expecting but still yummy.

Ingredients:
2 tbsps dry active yeast
2 tbsps brown sugar
2 c. warm milk

3 c. white flour
2 c rye flour
1-2 tsp salt (never actually measure my salt)
2 tbsp caraway seeds
1/2 c molasses
1-2 tbsp of olive oil (also never actually measured)

I started with 2.5 of white and 2 of rye and ended up having to add about a half cup as I was kneading it. It was very sticky at first. When I went to punch it down I met resistance for the first time, usually my fist just sinks in but this dough resisted me a bit which is when I had a small measure of panic because it was too late to do much of anything about it at that point but knead it as much as I thought it could stand and coat it in some more oil and cross my fingers. I came back 30 minutes later (I couldn't resist!) and peeked at it's progress at rising number 2, it was rising! Suddenly I had hope again for my bread. About 3/4 of the dough I saved in the refrigerator for Jeff to bake for his family on Sunday but the rest of it I molded into a ball and baked on my pizza stone. I ate two pieces almost as soon as it was out of the oven it smelled so good!

And yes, that's my garlic pesto bread in the ziplock bag in the background and my jalapeno bread bowl on the left. I made a lot of bread this week.

My hands smell of rye, molasses and olive oil, this makes me immensely happy.

Farmer's Market and Tassajara Bread Book

I called the contact for the Waconia Farmer's market yesterday and I'm now going to be selling my bread there this summer! I'm very excited about this and have been thinking of the different kinds I'm going to make and figuring out how much it costs me to make a loaf of bread and how much to charge to make it worthwhile to make all that bread. The first one is June 8th and it's every Tuesday from June through September. The guy said that last year there was only one other person selling bread there and that most of the days they hadn't even shown up and so far no one else as said they'll be selling it so looks like I'll be the only one, makes me hopeful that I'll do well with sales.

On my brother's recommendation I picked up the Tassajara Bread Book. Amazing bread book, he has two more risings then I do and I'm very curious to try his method of baking bread. And while I was never really against whole grains (I prefer them actually) his reasoning for why people should bake with whole grain flour instead of processed is pretty solid.

"Wholeness means that the flour, meal, or flakes contain all of the elements of the whole grain, particularly the germ, that part of the kernel from which the grain would sprout if planted. So this germ is the most life-containing, life-giving part of the grain... For this reason whole cornmeal, which contains the germ, will have a greater life-containing, life-giving quality than the "degermed" cornmeal found in supermarkets. Whole cornmeal is a live food... Degermed cornmeal is a dead food, as it lacks the germ (of life)."

It's a book I highly recommend to anyone wanting to make bread.

Garlic Pesto Bread and Beer Sourdough

I made four mini loaves of bread yesterday, two of a plain beer sourdough bread and two of my garlic pesto bread. I've made the garlic pesto bread before but it had been awhile.

The sourdough turned out pretty well, I think next time I will add 1.5 cups of my starter instead of just the one. The sourdough taste was a little too subtle for me. But the beer is fantastic in sourdough, especially since it's in the starter as well as in the rest of the bread dough. For the sourdough all I did was substitute the water for beer (Fat Tire again) and added in one cup of my sourdough starter (anyone have a name suggestion for my starter?) I also ended up needing to add an extra cup or so of flour. I split the normal recipe that I use to make one big loaf and made two smaller ones. I baked one in a pan but the other I baked on the pizza stone, just to play with new shapes again. Before I had bread pans I baked all of my bread on the pizza stone and sometimes I miss getting to shape my bread.

For the garlic pesto bread I crushed about eight or nine cloves of garlic and mixed them into the dough, I was also very liberal with the oil. Total I probably added two tablespoons into the dough. I usually add parmesan cheese at this point too but I forgot this time. In the past I have also mixed in the pesto at this point but I wanted to try Jamie Oliver's way of making pesto so I waited till after punching it down to add in the pesto. Once I punched it down and kneaded it for a few minutes and split it in two then I laid it out one half on my floured table and pushed and pulled the dough till it was flattish then I spread the pesto over the entire surface and rolled it up like a burrito. Repeat for the other half. The pesto also had quite a bit of oil in being pesto and I rubbed more over all the outside of the loaf before letting it rise again. Once it was all done I was excited to cut into it to see my pesto swirl, and was disappointed to find no swirl, just green tinted bread (one of the very fun things about pesto bread). I think I spread my pesto too thin because I had flattened my bread out too much and created a large surface to spread the pesto on. The flavor was perfect so I don't think the solution is more pesto but rather less surface space so I can do a thicker layer of pesto. All the oil in the bread is great too and spreading it on the top made a nice flaky crust.

Beer Bread with cheddar and jalapenos

This was accumulation of ideas. I had made beer bread a few times already (regular bread recipe with beer in place of water) and a friend of mine suggested adding cheese and jalapenos to it, this sounded like a fantastic idea to me.

Then I started an experiment with sourdough. The idea of letting dough sour before baking with it seemed a little counter intuitive to me but I wanted to give it a go. However to appease the part of me that was a little squeamish about letting my food sour before eating it I decided I would make a beer sourdough starter instead of a normal one with just water.

And so all these ideas came together into one loaf of bread last night (or rather into six bread bowls, also a running experiment).

Changes to the basic recipe:
-added a few generous handfuls of shredded sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese to the flour and salt
-used a bottle of warm Fat Tire in place of the water (any beer will do, Fat Tire has been my favorite to use so far though).
-added 1 cup of my beer sourdough starter
-once everything else was mixed together but before I started seriously kneading the dough I added in a jar of sliced, pickled, jalapenos (drained). Probably about 1.5 cups.

As always, adding in new ingredients meant shifting the total amount of flour and liquid. I use a 1/4 cup measuring cup to add in more flour as needed and in this case I ended up pouring a few splashes from the bottle of beer I was drinking from while making it.

Just before baking the bread bowls I brushed on olive oil and sprinkled a generous amount of the cheese on top. Because of the shape of my oven I had to bake them 3 to a pan, one on top of the other so after about 20 minutes I quickly switched the pans around to help them bake more evenly and then let them bake for another 15-20 minutes.

They turned at amazingly delicious and incredibly spicy.

Basic Bread Recipe

My basic bread recipe (makes one large loaf):

In a small bowl gently combine:
2 cups warm water
1.5 tbsp dry active yeast
2 tbsp brown sugar
let sit for about 10 minutes, or until it becomes foamy

In a larger bowl:
4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
mix together and create a well in the center, when yeast mixture is ready pour into the well and stir gently with your hands until it becomes dough like then start kneading for about five minutes or so. Add more flour or water as necessary, dough should be smooth and elastic and shouldn't stick to your hands too much. I will pour about a tablespoon of olive oil onto my hands before I start kneading too much, it helps keep the dough from sticking to your hands and adds a nice flavor/texture to the bread.

Cover with a damp towel and let rise in a warm place for about 45-60 minutes, until doubled in size. Punch down and knead again for about 10 minutes or so. Let rest for a few minutes while getting the pan ready (lightly oiled) then shape the dough as desired, cover with a damp towel again and let rise for another hour or until doubled in size. This is a good time to preheat the oven. Bake at 350 for about 35-40 minutes. Bread will be a nice golden brown color when done and will make a hollow sound when tapped with a knuckle. Remove from pan and let cool before storing. Some people claim you should let bread cool completely before consuming. I think these people are crazy. Bread hot and fresh from the oven is one of the best things on this planet.