Easy, Fresh Italian Bread

A warm welcome to new subscriber Margot!


As part of last week’s recipe for a delicious spaghetti and homemade meatballs dinner with an easy-to-prepare no-cook tomato sauce, I promised to come back with directions for the fresh-baked Italian bread I served on the side. Today I keep that promise.


What’s that you say? Baking bread is difficult? Not at all! Although we’ll be making ours by hand, remember that some people make bread by putting the ingredients in a bread machine, walking away, and coming back later when the bread is finished, with the machine having done all the work; how much thinking could be involved? This is especially true of Italian bread, which is usually kept simple because one of its main purposes is mopping that delicious sauce from the entrée plate, and you wouldn’t want embellish it with herbs or other savory flavors that might conflict with your sauce. (That said, it’s also mighty good gently dipped in a small dish of either plain or herbed extra virgin olive oil. I like a dash of vinegar too, but that’s just me.)


If you’re concerned that bread takes hours to make, I have more good news. While it’s true that several hours will pass between the time you start to the time you have fresh, warm bread to serve, for almost all of it the dough is doing the work while you’re off living your life. In the culinary world, this is known as “inactive time.”


Among the few simple ingredients this recipe uses is bread flour. That’s not the same thing as all-purpose flour, but it’s easy to find right next to it in the baking aisle at any supermarket. For a quick description of what the difference is, here’s a link to a recipe for Savory Crust Pizza posted here previously.


This introduction to bread-making would be incomplete without this bit of wisdom I read in a wonderful book call, “How I Learned to Cook” by Kimberly Witherspoon and Peter Meehan. It's a compilation of early experiences related by a collection of well-known chefs. One of the chapters was from Nancy Silverton, co-founder (and bread expert) of a number of high-level restaurants in California. What she said, which I simply loved, included this:


"I realized I couldn't think about bread the way I thought about pastry or pasta or any other typical culinary undertaking. Bread is alive. Minor inconsistencies are a fact of life, not a mark of failure. The tiny variation in the loaves from day to day made them unique, not imperfect. And the relationship of a baker to her bread is like any other kind of serious relationship you have with anybody in life. It's never perfect. It takes so much work. And every time you think that you've mastered it, the next day you're brought back to reality and it needs some more work."


Let’s bake some fresh bread! This recipe makes four 4 loaves.


Dissolve 1 package (1/4 oz.) dry yeast and ½ teaspoon of sugar in 2 cups of 110 degree F water and let it rest for about five minutes. (The mixture should foam while resting.)


Sift 1-1/2 pounds of bread flour, setting another ¼ pound aside for adding later if needed for texture. (It’s easier to add flour to a dough that’s too moist than it is to add liquid to a dough that’s too dry.)


Add 1 tablespoon of salt and mix well, since direct contact with the salt will kill the yeast in the next step.)















Add water-yeast mixture and mix to form dough.


Knead for 8-10 minutes until the dough becomes smooth and elastic, and just a bit sticky. (You can do this by hand, but it’s easier with a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment.)


Place dough in a well oiled bowl and let stand until about double in size. (Usually 1-2 hours.) The stove top or the top of the refrigerator are good places for this.




After the dough has doubled in size, pressing down with hands to deflate it, then turn it out onto your counter and divide it into four portions.




Press each portion into an oval.









Fold the long sides toward the center. Press out again and repeat.







Using palms, roll each into a cylinder 12 inches long. (Start with palms in the middle and work toward the ends to make the cylinders longer. Don’t pull the dough, which will toughen the gluten in the flour.)


Place each cylinder on a baking sheet dusted with cornmeal. Cover loosely with oiled wrap and “bench-proof” until doubled, about 45 minutes – 1 hour. While the loaves are proofing, pre-heat the oven to 500 degrees.


When the loaves have finished proofing, make three lengthwise cuts on top of each loaf. Place each loaf in oven and bake until browned, about 10 minutes.


Lower the temperature of the oven to 400, and continue baking for another 20-25 minutes until well-colored. Let the loaves cool a bit on racks.


Happy bread-making!


See you next week with another delicious, kitchen-tested recipe made from easy-to-find ingredients. Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)

Savory Crust Pizza

Forgiveness asked, please, for being a half a day late with this post. (I normally look to have new posts up every Saturday morning, and occasionally even Friday evening.) Hopefully you will consider it worth the wait.


A sharp-eyed reader recently noted that, in my profile picture, I’m putting a pizza into the oven, and asked that sometime soon I post the recipe. I thought it was a great idea. And so, by special request and with great pleasure, I give you this week the gift of Savory Crust Pizza. And a great gift you will find it to be.


While just about everyone loves eating some form of pizza, the choices and combinations of topping can vary widely. And so, rather than being about one particular type of pizza, in order to be useful to a wide range of readers this recipe is really about two things:
• A delicious, savory crust that goes beyond being simply a holder for the toppings and brings a flavor of its own.
• General guidelines that will be helpful when applying toppings.



And therein is one of the great strengths of homemade pizza: the toppings can be custom- selected in combinations that go beyond those offered by a typical pizza parlor. (As a side note, since pizza bakes for a short time at a high temperature, it would also be easy to let children select and apply their own toppings to have as dinner only a short time later!)


This recipe uses bread flour. For any readers new to making pizza or working with dough in general, a brief flour primer may be helpful. Otherwise, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. Specialty flours aside, you’ll generally find three kinds of wheat flour in the supermarket: all-purpose flour, pastry flour (or cake flour), and bread flour. The difference is in their gluten content. Gluten is a complex string of proteins that, when developed by kneading, adds chewiness to the dough. When the dough is overworked, such as by being kneaded for too long, the chewiness becomes extreme and the dough becomes overly tough. For this reason, cakes and pastries, which need as little chewiness as possible, are made with pastry or cake flour, which has the lowest gluten content. Chewier items, such as breads, are made with bread flour, which has a high gluten content. (There’s also “high gluten” flour which has even more gluten than bread flour and that is often used for chewy breads like focaccia, but this is typically a restaurant supply house item you won’t find at your local supermarket.) And, as the name implies, the gluten content of all-purpose flour is somewhere in the middle.


When it’s time to let the dough rest and ferment, a room-temperature kitchen should be adequate. However, if you’re concerned your kitchen may be too cool for the doughs to ferment properly, here’s a useful baker’s trick: heat your oven to 200 degrees, turn off the heat, put the foil-covered bowls with the dough into the oven, close the door, and let the oven return to room temperature while the doughs ferment.



Finally, a note about saucing the pizza. The recipe below calls for each pizza to get 3 ounces of sauce. If you’ve never made pizza before, you might spread the sauce and, after looking at it, think that amount can’t possibly be enough, and add more. Please resist any temptation to do that. Once the pizza is baking with all the other toppings, you’ll find 3 ounces of sauce was just enough.


This recipe makes dough for three 16” diameter (or 11” x 17” rectangular) pizzas.


First, let’s make our savory dough:
In a bowl, whisk 2 packages (1/2 oz.) of dry yeast in 1 quart of 110 degree water. When the yeast has dissolved, add 1 teaspoon of sugar, then whisk in 1/2 cup olive oil.


In a large bowl, combine dry dough ingredients -  3 pounds of bread flour, 2 tablespoons of  salt, 1-1/2 tablespoon of garlic powder, ¼ cup dried oregano, and ¼ cup dried basil - in a large bowl and mix well. Gradually add the yeast mixture and mix just until the dry ingredients are incorporated, forming a sticky dough. Be careful not to overwork the dough.


In a stand mixer (using the dough hook) or by hand on a floured surface, knead the dough for about 5 minutes. If necessary, add a little more flour to make dough smooth and elastic.



Divide the dough into three pieces and round off. Place each in a separate oiled bowl, and cover the bowl with foil or plastic. Allow the doughs to ferment on the kitchen counter until at least doubled (about an hour). When doubled, the dough should hold the indentation when poked with a finger.


Now let’s make our pizza! (If you’re not using all three doughs right away, any you’re not using can be frozen for later use.)
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.



Apply a very light coating of olive oil to a 16” round or 11” x 17” pan. Dust the  pan with corn meal. Place a dough on the pan and press it over the surface of the pan, working toward the edges. Flatten all but a 1” border around the circumference.



Apply a very thin coat of olive oil to the surface of the dough, spread the sauce, and add the selected toppings. A few suggestions for your consideration:
• 1 large green pepper slice
• Cheese: Shred and combine 1-1/4 cups mozzarella, ¼ cup parmesan, ½ cup provolone
• 8 ounces mushrooms
• 6 ounces sliced sausage
• Anything else that seems interesting (Note: If topping with ziti, cook ziti half-way, and coat with sauce before baking.)



Bake the pizza for 11 minutes, turning the pan around in the oven half-way. Drizzle lightly with olive oil, and you’re ready to serve. Bellisimo!


If you’d like a cookbook-style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe, just send a request along with your e-mail address and you’ll have it before you can say, “Send me a cookbook-style, notebook-ready copy of this recipe.”


See you next week with an exciting (to me, anyway) dessert recipe! Till then, stay well, keep it about the food, and always remember to kiss the cook. ;-)