Easter 2: Sage bread

I wish I'd remember that this takes at least four hours to make before deciding to sleep in until noon.  It's not complicated at all, using something like six ingredients.  However, since you have to let it rise a couple of times, it's not fast.  It helps that I live in the tropics, so my rise times are maybe 20-50% shorter than they would be in any place that isn't 73 with 82% humidity all day everyday.

Step one: Measure out three cups of flour, and a cup of warm water.  Add some salt (maybe a tablespoon) to the flour, and a package of yeast to the water.  Stir the yeast in, and let it sit for fifteen minutes to proof.

 Step two: make a well in the flour, as that makes mixing it together easier.

Step three: add yeast mixture and four tablespoons of olive oil.  Use your hand (or a spatula) to mix the flour into the liquid, and when it sticks together, remove from the bowl and kneed until the dough is smooth and well mixed.  You may need to add a bit of water or flour to correct the dough (water if it's shaggy and falls apart, flour if it's super sticky).

Step four: I usually just throw it back in the mixing bowl, and drizzle some oil over the top, and then shake the bowl around to make the dough oil the bowl for me.  You could use a clean oiled bowl if you're OCD or something.  Let it sit covered until doubled in size, something like two hours.  You want to do this in a warm place, so maybe on top of your oven or something.  I used "the counter" since, you know, tropics.

 Step five: get a floured surface ready.

Step six: punch the dough once in the bowl, flip it over onto the floured surface, and pound it once on the bottom to drop out.  If you do it right, it'll look cool like this.  See where the dough blew the flour around? Cool.

Step seven: If you have fresh sage, you can use that, just chiffonade it really thinly.  I didn't, so I used dried.  I probably ended up with about a tablespoon.  It's not really essential to the whole thing, so this is where you can be creative.  Any herb would work, and you could do a cinnamon sugar thing if you wanted a sweet bread.  Cheese would probably work, although you'll need to kneed it in a bit more, I'd think.  Pretty much anything works, and you could just go with plain white if you wanted.  It's still going to be better than most other bread you can buy.

Step eight: Form it into a shape.  Ideally, you want something about a foot in diameter and round.  I flattened mine after taking this picture.  You can see that I put some corn meal down to ensure that the bread wouldn't stick.  Parchment would fix this problem, but I forgot to buy some.  Oops.  You also want to preheat the oven to 400 at this point, with a cookie sheet waiting in there.  While that's happening, let the dough sit a bit to rise again, and just generally relax.  Before putting it in, you can stab it with your fingers to make little holes, and then drizzle some olive oil on top to promote browning.  Or, you can be like me and totally forget both of these steps.  Slide the dough onto the preheated sheet and bake for 30-40 minutes.

Step nine: It should look like this when it comes out.  Sort of.  If you do the holes and oil, obviously it'll look different.

Step ten: slice and serve.  I usually do pie slice cuts, but it doesn't really matter.  The thing to note is that the outside is going to have a crisp cracker like texture, but the inside is a squishy moist fluff.  This means you should be a bit careful with the slicing, because otherwise you'll smash the fluff out of the center, and look silly.

This is kind of a universally good bread.  It sops up gravy and liquids wonderfully, or you can spread some stilton or other cheese on it without much trouble.  I think I might be making sandwiches this week using it.  I've also warmed up a bit in the oven, and then spooned a gob of jam (or apple butter) on it before.  Just because it has sage in it, doesn't mean the herb flavor is that overwhelming.