From the household: the easiest fast bread recipe

This is the bread I make when I need some in a hurry -- something to toast and nosh on while writing.  It's a substantial bread (which is not to mean that it's one of those loaves you make which refuses to rise and which you therefore desperately characterize as "substantial" so people will think you meant it to come out that way).

The basic recipe came from the website of Bäckerei Sieber in Au, a town in Canton St. Gallen in Switzerland.The recipe itself is for Tessinerbrot or "bread from Ticino"; down in that southern canton the Roman breadmaking techniques have persisted unusually tenaciously, and since Roman bread had a deserved reputation for being very high-end indeed, this is a good thing. The bread in the image has been tweaked a little with the addition of rye and caraway -- normally it's a white bread, which I suggest you try first if you want to start using this recipe. Later you can tweak it as you please, always being careful about the quantities. (Sorry the pic’s a little blurry: I just grabbed it with the phone. Too late to restage it, as the slices are now gone.) :)

The peculiarity about this recipe -- from the home baker's point of view, anyway -- is that the recipe manages its ingredients by mass rather than volume. This is how professional bakers do things, though, at least in Switzerland: it seems to get around the problem of how much moisture your local flour is in a mood to absorb today. One caveat:  this dough tends toward the wet and sticky end of the bread dough spectrum, so it's really easier made in a mixer with a dough hook.  Also, my version of the recipe uses the bake-it-in-a-preheated-pot technique which derives from the famous Lahey no-knead bread recipe. Pot baking produces a higher rise than usual and a really nice crust.

This recipe makes one big loaf. I've baked this in anything from a Romertopf to a single US-style loaf pan to (as the one in the pic was baked) in a 3-liter lidded casserole of enamelled cast iron. This recipe branches several times: think of it as a Choose-Your-Own-Bread story.

The ingredients:

• 660g flour (ideally, a high-grade white bread flour. If making a rye, use 550g of white flour and 100g of rye)
• 400g water
• 27g fresh yeast (or one package of fast-rise or regular dry yeast)
• 15g salt
• 33 g oil

Combine them in the bowl of your mixer and beat for about 6 minutes with the dough hook. Scrape into a large buttered or oiled bowl, seal with plastic wrap / cling film and set aside in a warm place to rise until doubled. In about an hour the dough will be about ready to deal with.

Here the recipe branches. If you're using a non-fast-rise yeast, punch it down after about twenty minutes, let it rest after the punch-down for another ten. If you're going to bake it in a preheated pot (as below), put it aside for its second rise and wait another hour or so, or until it's just about doubled. If you're using a fast-rise yeast, you don't need to punch the dough down: you're now ready to bake.

And here we have another branch in the recipe. If you're not baking the bread in a pot, then preheat the oven, butter your preferred baking container, scrape the dough into is as gently as possible, so as not to break the CO2 bubbles in the dough, and put it in the oven at 375F for about forty minutes. When it's finished, turn it out on a rack to cool completely before slicing.

If you are baking it in a pot, preheat the pot, its lid, and the oven all together on the highest heat your oven affords. (Ours goes up to about 550F.) Leave that pot in there for at least half an hour, because you want it really hot. After that half hour, remove the bottom of the casserole to a heatproof surface, and as quickly as you can -- without breaking any more of the CO2 bubbles in the dough than you have to -- scrape the dough into the pot. Get the lid out of the oven, cover the pot with it, and fire the whole business back into the oven again. Turn the heat down to 375F. Bake for 20 minutes: remove the lid: bake for another 20 minutes. And once again, turn out onto a rack to cool. (Miraculously, bread baked using this method will never stick to the pot unless you're doing a sweet bread that has a lot of sugar in it.)

That's it. Total labor time for a single loaf of excellent fresh bread is about 1/2 hour (getting the ingredients, minding the mixer while it's working so it doesn't jump off the counter, handling the dough...). During the rise time you can be off doing something else, like weeding the front garden or working on the dialogue between Kit and Nita and the snotty new young wizard they're mentoring.

This bread toasts brilliantly, by the way. I think I'll go have some now.

If You Knew Fiuggi (or: Deepcon XIII, March 2012)

It's a pleasure to confirm that we'll be attending Deepcon XIII in beautiful Fiuggi, Italy, next year. (I see that the news is already out here.)

Dates haven't yet been finalized, but the convention organizers advise us that the convention will be happening in the second half of March 2012.

And we would not miss it for anything. The unmatchable hospitality of the organizers, the other guests, and the attendees, makes it a gotta-be-there event: intimate and comfortable. And, OMG, the FOOD! Fabulous. It's such a pleasure to start with to have the chance to sit down twice a day and eat with your fellow con-goers -- food at conventions usually being such a hit-and-miss thing. But when the bill of fare includes such  superb regional (Lazian) food ... well! (Also: any place with a breakfast buffet that includes chocolate cake is okay by me.)

And the hill-town ambience of Fiuggi can't be beat. (Neither can the hotel's downstairs spa: Fiuggi is a spa town of considerable vintage.) ...Anyway: we had an absolute blast as guests in 2010, and can't wait to get back there!