Pug-lse rise faster.

A few years ago i found myself unemployed, living with my parents, and feeling relatively useless. Luckily when life teaches you a lesson it'll toss you a biscuit. For Christmas i got this book, and thus began my delve into the world of bread.
Bread actually only take about 1/2 of an hour to make, only that 30min is spread over the course of 6 hours. Which is great if you need something to do with your life:

Mom: What did you do today?
Me: Apply to one million jobs and make bread.
Mom: At least you're keeping busy.

Otherwise it would be:

Mom: What did you do today?
Me: Apply to one million jobs and read/watch tv.
Mom: You're just not trying hard enough!
(Which illogical, but what can you do?)

Making bread does suck if you're like, 'i have school then work and i'm trying to make a fucking cheese steak, rise damn it!' which is my current predicament.

I'm making Pugliese, which is the name of an Italian bread and an Italian kid i used to go to school with who looked kind of like the wolf man. It 'illegidly' has a hard thin crust and a super soft inside that goes perfectly with cheese sauce.

First you have to make the biga (a type of starter (yeast that's cultivated a little more (science stuff))) 1-3 days in advance, and that is basically just mixing some flour yeast and water, shoving it in a bowl, and letting it rise for like 6 hours.



Fascinating. At one point i was obsessed, and decided to take on the task of making barm, the starter for sourdoughs and advanced breads. This process is a bitch, because you literally have to cultivate seeds, then cultivate a primary starter, then turn the whole thing into barm, that pretty much has to be 'fed' (refreshed) every three days. The whole process takes about 2 weeks, and once you have the actual barm, you need to use it regularly because you make more of it every three days, which is just impossible. Or you can throw half of it out, which i could just not bring myself to do. So basically what happened is i started to just double the feed, which doubled the batch every three days. Even if you make bread every fucking day of your life you will never need that much barm. Also it got too large for one bowl so at one point i had about 5 in our laundry room, which is separate from the house and totally insulated/where the furnace is so it's the best place for this to rise. Anyway, i guess i took a day off or something because one of the buckets o' barm overflowed into the basket of laundry my mom just washed, and she was SOOO pissed. I was forced into a bread hiatus after that, and even now she gives me kind of a look whenever i set a bowl out to rise.

So mix the biga with some more flour/salt/yeast throw some room temperature water in there, and wait.


Then stretch it and wait and repeat 3 times, and set it aside for two hours and blah blah blah...

Shape! That cloth is actually a special bread cloth called a couche (no fool'n).


I guess i'm hard to buy presents for because suddenly when i picked up this hobby everyone started buying me bread stuff. Before that i got a lot of soap (which, if you've got something to say just come out and say it). Also who doesn't like hot bread right out of the oven? If you don't you might as well just get off this planet because you oBviously are from another galaxy that's probably full of losers.

Rise for another hour:


Bake! You kind of have to replicate a hearth for this, which means: get the oven as hot as you can, put a pan full of water below the bread, and for the first 2min spray the sides with water every 30 sec. And Ta-da!


How rustic.