Simple Bread

This is my sister K.K.'s recipe. I have reprinted it here as she gave it to me. Things did not go exactly as it says. See my notes at the end.

Ingredients:
3 cups lukewarm water
1 packet of yeast
1 ½ tablespoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 ½ cups flour
Optional: You can add-
· raisins and cinnamon,
· walnuts and orange flavored craisins (I might also try adding some orange zest to give some extra zing),
· basil and garlic cloves,
· or just some honey to give it a little bit of sweetness

Instructions:
1. In a 5-quart bowl, mix the yeast, water and salt. Add all the flour and any other optional items, then use a wooden spoon to mix until all ingredients are uniformly moist. This will produce a loose and very wet dough.

2. Knead the dough for aprox. 5 min

3. Place the kneaded dough in an oiled bowl and cover, allowing the dough to rise for at least 2 hours, but not longer then 5 hours.

4. After rising, the dough can be baked immediately, or covered (not completely airtight) and refrigerated up to 14 days. The dough will be easier to work with after at least 3 hours refrigeration.

5. Uncover the dough and sprinkle the surface with flour. Pull up and cut off a 1-pound (grapefruit-size) piece of dough (serrated knives are best). Store the remaining dough in the bowl and refrigerate for baking at another time.

6. Hold the mass of dough in your hands and add a little more flour as needed so it won't stick. Create a smooth ball of dough by gently pulling the sides down around to the bottom, rotating the ball a quarter-turn as you go. While shaping, most of the dusting flour will fall off. The bottom of the loaf may appear to be a collection of bunched ends, but it will flatten out during resting and baking. Shaping the loaf this way should take no more than 1 minute.

7. Place the dough on a lightly floured pan. Allow the loaf to rest for about 40 minutes. It does not need to be covered.

8. Preheat oven to 450 F and while the oven is preheating place a broiler pan on a rack below where you will place the bread or on the floor of the oven.

9. When the dough has rested for 40 minutes, dust the top liberally with flour, then use a serrated knife to slash a 1/4-inch-deep cross or tic-tac-toe pattern into the top.

10. Quickly but carefully pour 1 cup of hot water into the broiler tray and close the oven door.

11. Bake for about 30 minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned and firm to the touch. Allow the bread to cool completely, preferably on a wire cooling rack.

Notes:
Apparently the "lukewarm water" part is very important. I think the water I used was more on the" luke" side, and apparently yeast leans more to the "warm" part. So it didn't activate. I'm not sure if this is because of the yeast situation, but my dough was never wet and loose. It was dry and compact as soon as I got all the flour in. I don't understand this part, but maybe the yeast causes the water to expand or something. Anyway, that was my first tip off that something was wrong, but I forged ahead and set the kneaded dough aside in the oiled bowl. At two hours it had not risen at all, so i turned it over, convinced that that the other side was less floury and dry and was sure to rise. At five hours I believed that it was starting to feel a little springy and perhaps had risen a bit, but since the instructions warn against more than five hours of rising I didn't want to risk further catastrophe, so I put the dough in the fridge. Since I had waited an extra three hours for it not to rise, I missed my window to bake the bread yesterday. So I left it in the fridge overnight in hopes that a miraculous transformation would happen. But I was met today with a large, hard, dry block of dough. My choices were to throw it out and waste all the effort and supplies, or keep the faith and follow instructions 5-11. It was a little absurd, but I made the grapefruit sized dough ball and set it aside to rest, and (I hoped) to spread out and fill the pan. (I didn't use any extra flour because it wasn't sticky at all.) After forty minutes, a grapefruit sized dough ball was sitting in a pan. I pounded it out to the edges of the small cake pan, added a little more dough from the fridge to fill it out and baked it for thirty-five minutes. The result is a thin, dense bread. It's not terrible though. I had two little pieces when it was fresh from the oven, so it wasn't hard. But DR gave a piece to Baby J a few hours later and said it worked great as a teething biscuit. So it probably wants to be heated up and eaten with coffee or tea. It's kind of like a biscotti. But there is another huge block of this dough in the fridge that still needs to be baked. It will be a lot of unleavened bread to eat, would you like to come for tea and toast?