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There is noth­ing quite like the smell of bread bak­ing.  Unless of course it’s cake or cook­ies bak­ing.  But bread fills the house with that mor­eish, yeasty fra­grance you just can’t get enough of.  Recently I pur­chased a fab­u­lous book titled “Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.”  You start with a basic dough from the mas­ter recipe that can be kept in the fridge until you want to bake some­thing.   At which point you take some of the dough and add your flavours, shape, bake and eat!  This week I have really been hun­gry for Tan­doori Chicken so decided to make that and what bet­ter to accom­pany this meal than some tasty gar­lic naan bread.

Mas­ter Recipe

3 cups of luke­warm water
1 1/2 table­spoons gran­u­lated yeast (1 1/2 pack­ets)
1 1/2 table­spoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all pur­pose white  flour, mea­sured with the scook and sweep method.

Mix­ing and Stor­ing Dough

1.   Warm the water slightly:  It should feel just a lit­tle warmer than body tem­per­a­ture, about 100 degrees F.  Warm water will rise the dough to the right point for stor­age in about 2 hours.  You can use cold tap water and get an iden­ti­cal final result;  then the first ris­ing will take 3 or even 4 hours.  That won’t be too great a dif­fer­ence, as you will only be doing this once per stored batch.

2.  Add yeast and salt to the water in a 5 quart bowl or prefer­able, in a reseal­able, lid­ded (not air­tight)  plas­tic food con­tainer or food grade bucket.  Don’t worry about get­ting it all to dissolve.

3.  Mix in the flour — knead­ing is unnec­es­sary.  Add all of the flour at once, mea­sur­ing it in with dry ingre­di­ent mea­sur­ing cups, by gen­tly scoop­ing up the flour and lev­el­ing it off with a knife.  Mix this in with a wooden spoon, or high capac­ity food proces­sor (14 cups or larger) or mixer fit­ted with a dough hook attach­ment.   If it get’s too dry you can reach into the dough with very wet hands and press the mix together but don’t knead.  You are fin­ished when every­thing is uni­formly moist.  This will yeild a dough that is wet  and loose which will prob­a­bly con­form to the shape of the container.

4.  Allow to rise.  cover with a lid but not air­tight.  Do not use screw top jars as the gasses will not be able to escape and the jars could explode.  Allow the mix to rise at room tem­per­a­ture for approx­i­mately 2 hours.  The top may begin to col­lapse in on itself, this is ok.  Longer ris­ing times up to 5 hours will not harm the result.  You can begin using any por­tion of the dough after this time to make your breads.

When you wish to bake some bread, DO NOT KNEAD.  Just shape your loaf in 30 to 60 sec­onds and you are ready to bake.  It is best baked on a pizza stone with some corn­meal sprin­kled on it to pre­vent your loaf from sticking.

For my naan bread I just took a peach sized por­tion and rolled it flat with my rolling pin, shaped it into 8 inch ovals and fried it in a cast iron skil­let that had some ghee (clar­i­fied fat)  in the bot­tom of it.  I cov­ered the skil­let and rotated the bread after about two min­utes.  Watch for burn­ing and adjust your tem­per­a­ture accord­ingly.  I cooked it for another 3 to four min­utes on the sec­ond side and then but­tered it with some roasted gar­lic but­ter we had made. You can use this mas­ter recipe to make all man­ner of breads and I will be try­ing dif­fer­ent types here again in the future.  If you enjoy home­made bread this is a must have book for your col­lec­tion.  Bread mak­ing at home has never been this easy!

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I LOVE kitchen gad­gets, imag­ine that!  Nat­u­rally,  one of my
favourite stores to visit is Williams-Sonoma.  Recently I picked up a Pocket Pie Mold in the shape of an apple since Fall is now upon us and I enjoy mak­ing and eat­ing apple pie.

The mold comes in sev­eral dif­fer­ent shapes — star, heart, pump­kin and the one I picked was the apple. It is heavy duty plas­tic and has the cut­ters on the out­side of the mold and the press on the inside. Very easy to use.

The instruc­tions are on the back of the box and include a recipe for pas­try made in a food proces­sor which we all thought very tasty. You let the pas­try sit, wrapped in plas­tic, in the refrig­er­a­tor for 2 hours or so and then roll it out, cut out your shapes, fill with pie fill­ing and press together. You fin­ish them off with an egg wash and I sprin­kled mine with Demer­ara Sugar — a coarsely ground sugar from sugar cane not beets.  Bake for 20 min­utes and get ready to eat!

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I’ve decided to quickly add the recipe from the box just in case some­one has dam­age to their box and they need it.

Ingre­di­ents

2  1/2 Cups (390g) all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 Tbs sugar, plus more to sprin­kle on top
16 Tbs (2 sticks/250g) cold unsalted but­ter cut into 1/2 inch dice
6 to 8 Tbs ice water
1/2 to 1 cup pie fill­ing
1 egg lightly beaten with 1 tsp water for seal­ing pies and glazing

Method

In a food proces­sor, pulse together the flour, salt and the 2 Tbs sugar until com­bines, about 5 pulses.  Add the but­ter and pulse until the mix­ture resem­bles coarse meal, about 10 pulses.  Add 6 Tbs of water and pulse twice.  The dough should hold together when squeezed with your gin­gers but should not be sticky.  If it is crumbly, add more water 1 tsp at a time, puls­ing twice after each addi­tion.  Divide the dough in half, wrap with plas­tic wrap and press each into a disk.  Refrig­er­ate for at least 2 hours or up to overnight.

Let the dough stand at room tem­per­a­ture for 5 minutes.

On a floured sur­face, roll out 1 dough disk into a round 1/16 to 1/8 inch thick.  Brush off the excess flour.  Using the pocket pie mold cut out 8 of each shape.  Gather up scraps and reroll to cut more shapes.  Repeat with the remain­ing dough disk.

Place a solid dough shape in the bot­tom half of the cut­ter and gen­tly press the dough into the mod.  Fill the cen­ter with 1 to 2 Tbs pie fill­ing and brush the edges of the dough with the egg wash.  Top with a match­ing shape which has the dec­o­ra­tive cut out vent.  Press the top half of the cut­ter down to seal and crimp the edges of the pie.  Remove the pie from the mod and place on a parchment-lined bak­ing sheet.  Repeat with the remain­ing dough.

Pre­heat an oven to 400 deg F (200C).  Brush the pies with the egg wash and sprin­kle with sugar.  Bake until the crust is golden brown and the fill­ing is gen­tly bub­bling.  15 to 20 min­utes.  Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes.

These pies can also be fried but use two match­ing pie dough pieces WITHOUT the vent hole to avoid leak­age of the fill­ing while frying.

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You will find the mold at Williams-Sonoma.com where it is priced at $9.95.  Over­all, even though it really is a sin­gle use prod­uct, I liked the ease and speed at which I could make these pies.  They look very fes­tive and are a man­age­able size for a quick snack or dessert… Mmmm.. imag­ine them hot served with cus­tard or vanilla ice-cream!

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This sil­i­cone edged beater blade for the Kitchenaid mixer is a must have.  Watch this YouTube.com short video demon­stra­tion cour­tesy of nursegad­get.  You will see just how fab­u­lous it is and you won’t need to stop and scrape down the bowl sides as often, if ever!

BUY ONE HERE!

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Oh wow!  Look what my thought­ful hus­band bought me for Christ­mas!  HE loves brown­ies and I guess he hopes to be get­ting more of them now that I have this great new pan.

It has edges and cor­ners every­where as you can see so for those of you who love that in a brownie this is the pan for you!

This pan is made of very heavy duty metal and won’t get banged about in the cup­board if you have them stored like I do!  The heavy guage metal also ensures even cook­ing through the entire brownie.  You will of course have to adjust the cook­ing time to suit your oven and the level of “done­ness” you like your brown­ies to have.

I have enjoyed using this pan so far, almost as much as Hubby has eat­ing the brown­ies it produces!

Baker’s Edge Non­stick Edge Brownie Pan