The Return of The Bread - Flat Oven Tray Bread

Bread is back!

I got inspired to take photos this time as I had been feeding my sourdough starter so I could bake and asked my wife which shape bread I should make. Usually it's in a round bread in a pot or a "normal bread". She asked for a flat oven tray bread.

I hadn't made any of those, but I had promised that she can decide and I had to do what she asked for. I'm not a genius baker, even though I pretend to be one, so I just decided to do a very standard sourdough but with more water. I assumed it would make the dough soft enough to spread well on a tray.

I started by mixing together the flour, water and the sourdough starter. I should mention the % of each, but I have no clue on how much sourdough starter I had. I know I had 75% water (so it's 75 grams of water per 100 grams of flour) and the sourdough starter was a bit moist too, but it doesn't matter.

Lazy bastard, that's who I am. I knead only with the machine. Long enough, typically I'm going for 13 minutes but the machine is really loud and I'm and old, old man. _{Not that old.}

I'm glad I'm not a food blogger. Maybe I should continue writing like I would be one?

Swinga-dingy oh the wonderful pinchy-winchy of salt. 20 grams of salt per 1000 grams of flour. That gives the bread a wonderful flavor and, basically sparks life in the bread like magical fairy dust.

I add the salt later, this helps gluten. In some way.

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I'm an engineer, I don't know and care how these things work. It's good as long as they work. If they'll stop working, I'll just ask someone who actually knows.

Engineers can't do shit.

That's a secret, don't tell anyone.

After the approx. 13 minutes of kneading, I added salt and olive oil.

I have no clue on how much olive oil I added there.

I'm surprised I'm ever getting any decent bread.

Usually I suggest people follow the recipes as well as they can. I don't have a recipe so I don't need to follow anything. I don't suggest this method in baking to most, as every now and then my bread is terrible. Never ever it's amazing. Don't become like me, read recipes instead.

7 more minutes of kneading with the machine and I was finished. Or the dough was. I let it to rest, under a silicone lid, so it won't dry up. I left it for..

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A few hours?

Ta-DA! This is how it had risen. Now my favorite part in baking starts, you'll see some amazing photos on how I'm handling the dough.

First, add some flours to the platform, so you can lift the dough on it.

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I don't have any photos of the next phase. Holy shit the dough was soft. It was almost like liquid. I had completely forgot how much water I had added to it.

The second I poured the dough to the platform, it started to run everywhere.

I had no time to get the camera, I had to handle it very quickly and lift it to the tray.

After I got the dough to the tray and washed my hands I managed to take a photo. The focus isn't perfect right here, this shot was taken with a 50mm lens with f/2.2 so the depth of field wasn't too good. I'm not sure why we have insufficient lightning in our house. I could have done this better.

Well, at least only my photo is disappointing, not the bread.

I covered the bread to rise for another few hours.

See, this is how sticky and running the dough was. It's not dough which is easily handled, it's like dude-mayonnaise some sticky liquid.

Terrible. But at least it was easy to spread on the baking tray.

Few hours of rising, short bake in 225 Celsius degrees and the bread was ready. It had risen quite well, as the bread was meant to be flat I'm glad it didn't rise too much.

This is an ugly bread. But I don't care, what's on the inside is what's important.

Also as a tip, bread like this is quite easily cut. You can get perfect sized pieces of it easiler than from a typical bread. You can get as huge piece as you want and tell everyone "I just ate one piece of bread". You could even cut the bread in half, fill it with cheese and sausages and tell everyone "I ate only one sandwich yesterday".

But for me, the perfect reward is warm bread with some butt butter.

Thanks if you read, even bigger thanks if you skipped all the text and just checked the photos. Those of you who comment without reading anything are the true heroes. Thank you. Thank you all.