baking must be hard

I'm sure you remember that I was telling you about this no-knead bread (which is really difficult to not type as "know-knead" but that's neither here nor there). Well, the idea is that by removing the kneading and the mixing even slackers can bake bread. Well folks, this shit is stil hard.

First I followed the instructions, which I'll admit was hard because the formatting on the recipe misplaces the initial "2 cups of wheat flour" and at first I was staring with perplexion (no, not a word, just keep going) at this soupy mess masquerading as dough, until my man made it clear that ovbviously my solid:liquid ratio must be off. I stared at the recipe a few more times until I saw the errant "2 cups of wheat of flour" floating off to the left.

So, my dough is no longer liquid, which is ace. But, not content to follow directions and also feeling a bit embarrassed that I didn't have rye flour, I added a handful of poppy seeds and a few teaspoons of rep pepper and artichoke tapenade from Trader Joe's. My intention was to make the bread look more artisan-ish. Well, it got more ish, I'll tell you.

I was supposed to let it sit four hours then bake. It was midnight by the time four hours came and I don't bake at midnight, so I put it in the fridge. If someone could let me know if this was my first mistake that'd be great. Anyway, next day I take out the dough, which looks nicely risen, and shape it into my casserole dish thing. I let it sit because the man said it'd be a good idea to make sure the middle wasn't colder than the rest of it.

I baked it, took it out. Looked beautiful. The bits of pepper definitely had it looking gourmet. But when I cut it in half it was definitely soggy in the middle, and if I'm honest, kind of dry on the outside. But the middle was so soggy it just had to go back in. And, you guessed it, even worse when it came back out.

Can you see the soggy bit? Moral of the story, bread is mad hard. I will endeavor to make it tastier in the future.