Baking Loaves of Bread

I’m still baking lots and lots of bread. Because it gets eaten! Admittedly, it’s really nice to have bread in middle of grocery week — something that was difficult to make happen before I started baking.

Because I bake basically everyday, the important thing is that it only takes little effort and very little time. These issues have been my primary area of investigation in baking. The most popular method of easy baking uses dutch oven, but sometimes I don’t want to have to lift such heavy item out of really hot oven or have to wash it after it cools or the bowl the shaped dough was rising in (I’m laaaazy!). So I have gone back to shape and bake. I throw in a cup of water into the broiler pan on the lower rack after I put in the shaped dough on the rack above. This seems to be the popular alternate method for generating steam (in dutch oven, the bread steams itself because it’s baked in small lidded container) and I think that it works just as well. One extra thing I like about no-dutch-oven method is that I can shape it however way I want, and slash it for different ridges (you get what you get in dutch oven — though usually rustic and pretty — because the hot vessel won’t let you slash after you dump the dough in it).

BUT, the easiest and most laziest bread I bake uses loaf pan. Mine is made of very thin aluminum (I haven’t tried anything else, this is all I happen to have!). I don’t even have to grease it because it doesn’t stick (probably because the bread shrinks a wee bit as it finishes baking?). I’m not sure why this isn’t like the most popular easy-method, because seriously, you can just lazily shape it (it doesn’t really matter what it looks like as long as it’s sort of loaf pan shaped) and dump it in the loaf tin. Let it rise again, in the tin, while oven is preheating, and then throw it in the oven. Because only the top part of the bread is exposed, the bread stays moist during baking. It produces least amount of “things to be washed” in the end. AND the bread is more conveniently shaped for making sandwiches.