Okay, so if you are a purist you might not like what I did to the Parmesan Olive bread recipe on the No-Knead Bread Variations page, since I cheaped out on some of the ingredients and still got a sort of astonishingly datable  loaf of bread:

Cheap Thrills Olive Parmesan

First of all, I didn’t get the good parmesan cheese where you grate it up, mainly because I don’t even know if we have a cheese grater. I’m sure we do but as a rookie baker I’m still a visitor in the kitchen and my wife was at work so I just went with the oh-so-convenient perfectly sized 7 ounce plastic bottle of grated parmesan.

Probably not perfect but I had more shopping to do, and considering that the recipe describes this loaf as so wildly expensive that you would probably only bake it for a prospective mother-in-law while you were still trying to marry the girl, I was worried about how much the Kalamata olives were going to cost.

Sure enough when the HyVee helpful smile in every aisle person showed me where the olives were, the pricing was somewhat on the order of investor items. Something like gold futures. Like around 8 dollars a bottle.

I should mention that I’m a  rookie shopper, too, when it comes to baking supplies (but really good at other essentials, like Power Bars and Gatorade). Your experienced cook/shopper, reading this (if they have managed to swallow their horror at what I have done already, and kept reading) will be thinking “Dear Hopeless Rookie, you should have looked for the bulk olives…”

It’s very possible that our HyVee had bulk olives but since:

• I didn’t have the recipe with me so I was worried that just the olives in this thing were going to cost a collection of essential appendages
• My wife had already told me she didn’t think she’d be into the olive bread
• She is also the budget chairperson
• It’s against the Man Laws to ask directions more than once a day

I went for (drum roll) the regular cheap black olives that you can get piled (lightly, darn it)  on your sandwich at Subway.

Did I mention that I don’t like any other kind of olives anyway? Even Popeye’s girlfriend never really did it for me.

Or anyone else that I know, really.

In any case, the generic black O’s in a can still needed to be sliced in half, which makes a guy feel like he is sort of like, actually cooking, since he  is  touching some kind of  food thing before heating it up, and (in this case) also resisted the temptation to just throw them in whole. Of course, cutting up the little slipperies means you get more olive effect for your 2/3 cup, so that paid off.

Ready to go. Here's your chance. Bring butter.

So, I saved probably 6 bucks on a loaf that I think the wife may  like after all. Admittedly it’s not that big on olive-y flavor, due to the GIGO rule of computer programming, but it has that parmesano thing in a big way and I only wish you all could be here right now to have a slice.

So, what’s left over from my first foray into baking bread? A few more rookie tips, some crust to deal with, and a discussion of mindshare, or breadshare in this case.

First of all I finally solved the “get the dough in the center of the cloche” problem that I mentioned in my one post that discussed actual baking. That was fixed due to the interposition of what is called parchment paper on the top of the proofing basket before flipping the dough over into the hot cloche. That way, wherever you drop the thing (on the cloche, we hope), you can always center it by tugging this way or that on the parchment paper.

That amazing blue eyed blonde loaf again

For my first two loaves I was sprinkling what I thought was wheat bran onto the oiled proofing basket in order to get some kind of grain effect on the finished loaf, but my wife informed me that what I had pulled out of the fridge was actually flax seed. So, considering the reputed effects of flax on digestive processes,  no one in our little family unit should need prunes for a week.

She then pointed out the actual wheat bran and the corn meal in the cupboard, and the latter is what I used for what turned out to be my blue-eyed blonde loaf. My next loaf used sesame seeds, and I also want to experiment with a floured version. These things come out looking so authentic, it’s miraculous: you are all of a sudden an artisan bread baker.

One cool thing I should mention is that I’m having a lot of fun using my iPhone to time all this baking. As they say in the Apple iPhone promos, there’s an app for that. Which is so true in this arena, considering that I can easily get on the computer and be absorbed in a consideration of what may be the next big web thing, and forget to take out the bread. Fortunately even the basic (included) iPhone application “Clock” has a timer that lets you set multiple alarms and even give them names such as “oven preheat to 450″ “bread in oven,” “lid off, reduce heat,” and “bread cools.”

Then while you are typing  away on Twitter and its time do so something with the bread, your iPhone vibrates and then jangles (I left the alert sound on “old car horn”) , and you just go do the right thing. Plus, since the alerts don’t erase after one use, you can just reschedule the prelabeled items for the next batch. Love it.

So what’s left after all this? For one thing, especially for those first two loaves, which were pretty crispy on the outside, we didn’t eat them quick enough for my 5 year old to be able to soldier through the crust a few days later. We had to cut the crusts off for him at that point.

I spoke to Eric (“The Bread”) about storage. My questions: What about bread bags? What about getting a bread box? What about my wife’s opinion that you simply cut the bread and stand it up edgewise on the cut surface?

All good, said Eric, followed by what most of you who have seen his breadmaking videos will recognize as Eric’s typical no nonsense advice: “Basically you just eat it up as fast as you can.”

That’s our Eric.

As far as leftovers goes, since I am the fourth child in a large family where food wasn’t always in abundance, especially for the smaller grabbers, I hate to see food go to waste. My mom was the kind of frugal person that would eat the whole apple rather than waste the possibly nutritious parts of the core, seeds be d#$@$%d. So I cut up the leftover crust that my little one couldn’t eat, soaked it in some hot milk spiked with sugar and cinnamon and called it “yummy.”

The other leftover of all of this baking is mindshare, in that once you start baking, you start to think of what else you could bake. Like, maybe I should make Kendra’s raisin bread, and of course I’m thinking of getting started with sourdough no knead (got the starter and the lovely blue-topped jar)  plus there are all of these variations on the no knead theme. I’ve even already acquired the spelt and the rye flour to go after what looks like the graduate level bread: the traditional European whole grain sourdough.

Maybe women can balance multiple topics in their head at one time, but guys are simpler. They can only process so many things at once. Now that I’m thinking of baking, I don’t have so much mindshare for my usual stuff, e.g. – which Netflix DVD I should get next.

Which may actually be good, in some ways, since bread is a lot better toasted.

Once your bread has risen the requisite 40 days and 40 nights (actually only 18 hours – but no matter what you call it, for those of us with a short attention span, it’s:  Still. A. Long.  Time.), you are supposed to beat it into submission, or at least spread it out with floured fingers into a more or less rectangular shape, which is then folded into thirds lengthwise and then once top to bottom, and then  left to rest for 15 minutes.

I don’t know why there is that particular folding pattern, or what it means for dough to “rest”, but as I explained earlier, I like to do the instructions exactly as given in case one of them is actually important. Not to be a slave to tradition for forgotten reasons, but it’s working thus far.

The real challenge is that 15 minutes. What to do then? Can’t exactly watch a TV show. If you go back to your computer you may forget the bread thing entirely. I’m not saying that I have ADHD, exactly, but what if I get an email asking for my opinion of the latest Nadal/Federer match? Anything could happen.

My solution is to use that 15 minutes to start another batch of bread. Since it takes about a day to get a whole loaf produced, and since there are likely to be friends and family that  you are going to want to gift with one of your magnum opii, you might as well make a bunch of loaves. A continual parade of happiness. Make bread not war. Improving the world, one loaf at a time. That sort of thing.

Another thing that this ameliorates:  your new-found bread snobbery. Or maybe guilt. Whatever you call it, it’s the experience you have when your breadmaking activities took a break for a few days and you are out of home made bread and are staring at the neglected package of store bought wheat at breakfast time, knowing that it was you, yes you, who allowed the family supply of the real stuff to diminish to the point where you are standing by the toaster waiting for a saggy piece of square storebought to get ready for whatever butter can do to add to the subpar event.

Use that  fifteen minutes wisely, and convert storebought bread infamy to no knead, fresh baked fame.

It may be amazing but even as a complete beginner you already come up with tips to make life easier for the next generation of bakers. The fact that only two hours separates you and your imaginary followers appears to be no obstacle to the largesse.

For example, I must report that the results of my flour mess (described but not cleaned up earlier) was noted by my wife with some concern later.

First of all, the level of efficiency that I had working with flour for the first time in 38 years was pretty low, and I spilled more of the stuff than I do now, only three loaves later.

Secondly, it’s not that I didn’t clean up after myself, but as you married guys know, what you consider clean and what a woman considers clean can be two very different things. They, of course, consider us a bit visually challenged, and we think they have some kind of laser vision. Plus maybe being the slightest bit crazed about the cleanliness/Godliness thing.

But the true reality check in the spilled flour arena is the “run your hand along the counter” test, which will reveal a grainy quality even to the most beefy guy, if he hasn’t really done a thorough clean up job.

It wasn’t the lack of detailed cleanup that bugged my wife, however, but the compromised, bread-dough spattered condition of the dishcloth after the event. She compassionately conveyed her master cook mom’s solution which is to scrape the big pieces of flour and dough off of the counter with a spatula, followed by a final cleanup with a wet paper towel.

My only modification to that was to use the stainless steel dough cutter or bench knife that I got from this site.  I just like using the official tools as much as possible.

It’s a guy thing.

Okay, so I finally mixed up the flour (and the other “dry ingredients”). And of course I knocked over the yeast, spilling a bunch of it, and made a mess of the flour (more on that later).

I’m not the intuitive type when it comes to this stuff, I’m the “do it exactly as they say” type. That way if something goes whacked, it’s their fault (whoever gave out the specs). Or at least then I can ask them what they think went wrong (and of course something did, the first time anyway)..

I also forgot to mention (see, I need a list) that I got an Escali Primo (what a great name!) kitchen scale on day one. That means I was weighing out rather than measuring the flour. (I recommend that you watch both of the intro videos on how to do the no-knead bread. Or, if you can only do one, do the long one… there’s lots of good detail –like how to measure your flour–in the latter).

Being picky as described I’m using a measuring spoon to drop in or take out a few microns of flour to hit the exact weight. Maybe I overdid it a bit, but I guess it worked out okay. You can never be too precise with instructions when you are totally ignorant.

Disclaimer: I’m not TOTALLY ignorant about breadmaking, since I actually had a recipe from my mother that I used to make in 1970 or so. But I kind of think that is long enough ago to reset my experience level as “beginner.”

In any case, my first batch went fine, and even though there was no kneading element, I enjoyed the dough folding section. Something about actually handling the dough makes you feel like you are actually baking something. Which is important because without that this recipe will make you feel like you are simply someone with a good watch.

In any case the only wacko problem I had in prepping my first loaf was that despite years of highly developed hand and eye coordination skills (mostly due to tennis), I completely fumbled the final handoff (wrong sport?) of the dough from the proofing basket into the hot cloche ( or “clay baker“), and plopped it so the dough was snuggled right up to the edge of the hot cloche.

I didn’t know what to do at that point, since thoughts of a loaf seared up one side and raw on the other were balanced by the horrible deflated mess I might make trying to shove the thing into the center, so I just left it.

That didn’t cause a problem, but the loaf DID come out kind of wierd, that is, uber-crispy and dark on the outside, and a trifle moist on the inside.

I had asked Eric what the insertable thermometer was for, and he said that you stick the thing in the bread (at the end of the last baking section) and make sure it’s up to 200 degrees in there.

I did, of course, follow instructions regarding the in-stick part and the temp was only up to about 165, but with the loaf threatening to take on the color of a charcoal briquette, I thought I’d bail on the interior temp thing and take it out on time.

The resulting loaf was actually edible, if a little crispy on the crust level, and I still thought it a bit moist on the center.

My wife thought it was fine, especially if toasted, and we speculated that maybe the 1/3 portion of whole wheat flour made it a darker loaf.

I spoke with Eric about it and he said that he thought my oven was maybe running a bit hot.

My own thought was that maybe putting the cloche on the bottom oven rack hadn’t been the best idea.

For the next batch Rise (the wife) advised that I change one variable at a time and see what happens. So I moved the cloche father away from the lower heating elements, up to the middle of the oven.

That still produced a fairly dark loaf. In hindsight I’d call it a brunette, since in my third loaf we reduced the oven temperature from the specified 500 degrees for the first 30 minutes to 450, and the second section dropped down to 425, and the resulting loaf was the loveliest blue eyed blonde you can imagine (so to speak).

It was so beautiful, I should have had it encased in lucite, and then maybe that could just be it for my baking career, third times a charm.

But I took a photo instead:

Blue eyed blonde beauty loaf of bread

Day 2

Found a place on the upper shelf for the cloche and the proofing basket

Day 3

Thought about when I might actually bake something

Day 4

Listened to the how-to video on no knead bread making

Day 5

Put breadmaking on my list of things to do

Day 6

Looked at my list

Day 7

No memory of this day, baking or otherwise

Day 8

Wondered if and when I’d ever get around to baking something

Day 9

Found the recipe for no-knead breadmaking again and watched BOTH videos (on the same page) and the how-to on using the proofing basket and cut and pasted the text of each into Word docs and blew them up to 18 point type and printed them out so I could have them ready to work from. Went out and bought 5 pounds each of King Arthur white and whole wheat bread flour.

So I actually showed up at the place where Eric and Denyce do this business. It’s hidden in a forest, and when you look out the window there’s a pond. Idyllic is the word. Love it. So there was no shipping as I picked up a baking cloche, some of the instant yeast, a proofing basket, and a thermometer, and headed home, armed to do bread.