emergency rations...

[carioca]

Just a quick tip to home bakers without electric/gas let alone brick ovens: try the microwave!

Background: we are still awaiting word on delivery of Bianca's chosen electric oven (no word from me on installation of a brick oven :-) ) so our youngest daughter offered to bake Bianca's sourdough bread in her oven in town. The dough was duly prepared from the surviving starter, put into pans for a second rising when the young one rang to beg off - her oven was playing up...

Bianca, always the impulsive Italiana, was about to toss the risen loaves into the bin, when I (the constant hoarder), suggested we could try a sourdough flapjack for which I'd seen a recipe somewhere.

No signor! But she thought to try an experiment: sourdough bread in the microwave. The dough was duly transferred to three glass containers, two rectangular, one round, two brown glass, one clear. I put the first lot, in a roughly bread-tin shaped glass container, in the microwave, at medium high and for 10 minutes. I upped this to 12 minutes, then added another five.

The loaf reappeared, rather rock hard on the outside, but perfectly cooked on the inside. We did the other two containers for 10 minutes each, then turned the loaves out to get rid of the excess moisture at the bottom.

I toasted a slice of the "rock" - and it was quite passable (remember, we hadn't been able to bake our daily bread for weeks now!). The next mornigh we sliced and toasted the other loaves, and again: at least the familiar sourdough taste was there, the structure was reasonable, except of course that the loaves had NO CRUST.

But hey, it was our own bread...

Cheers,

Carioca

NB: We have since established that in a rectangular Pyrex dish of about 1 L the sourdough must be allowed to rise to say 1 cm below the rim, then 'baked' for 15 minutes. In a round 2 L Pyrex dish, same rise but baking time 16 minutes...

(We still haven't either an electric or a stone oven, merde!)