No Recipe Bread

A dedicated pastry chef or artisal baker will tell you that unless you are an expert that you must follow a baking recipe with exact precision, or else you are doomed for failure. Baking is as much science and chemistry as it is artistry, and no one wants to serve a science experiment gone wrong. Many of us have pulled out a special occasion cake that failed to rise and vowed to never again disobey this cooking commandment.

If you are having the boss over for dinner, go ahead and stick to the recipe. But if you want to explore new territory, don't weigh yourself down with exactitudes.

More specifically, I'm talking about delicious bread here, people.

Bread. The staff of life. The human race was barely beyond caveman status and our ancestors were making it over an open fire. Or in a hot pit they dug underground. I can't believe that most of them had anything resembling a measuring cup. These people sustained themselves. Some of them thrived and produced legendary cultures (Greeks! Romans! Mesopotamians!) on their no-cookbook bread.

While I dutifully followed my French baguette recipe to the letter for years, I recently met a woman whose extensive dietary restrictions inspired her to come up with a bread recipe of her own invention. She has hired me to make this recipe for her from time to time, when she is unable to get to it on her own. I'll tell you right now, the batter is as ugly and unappealing as any bread dough can possibly be, but it bakes up gorgeously, and when she shares it with friends, they rave about it for days.

When I was little more than a child, living in one of my first rentals, working for a catering company, trying to be an uber-healthy health nut, I would "invent" some recipes for healthy baked goods. I'd tell my mother my invented recipe over the phone and she would snort...didn't sound like anything she had ever made, and for chrissakes, Karen...don't you need some leavening? That's going to be awfully dense.

Well, I had some lovely, hearty scones for a week. Tough luck if no one would try them. It just meant there was more for me.

I continue to cook for a growing population of folks with an extensive list of dietary restrictions. You can't just bake them a "normal" bread recipe. I have to cobble together many recipes or just create one. But I can bake for them. They do not have to give up bread.

What are the rules for no-recipe bread?
-You need a flour...a ground grain or dried legume. You can use gluten free flours for special diets.
-You need a fat...often not much. A little butter, oil, or egg.
-You need a flavor...salt, cinnamon, vanilla, anything really.
-You need a leavening...yeast, baking soda, baking powder, or even your egg will cause your grains to rise. Experiment. If your selected leavening is unsuccessful, the worst that can happen is you get to enjoy a flatbread
-You need some liquid...water, milk, pureed fruit or veggies (really! high water content!)

That's it. Mix it all up until it looks like thick cake batter. Put it in the oven and watch it 30 minutes or so at 350 to 425 is usually fine. (WE"RE EXPERIMENTING HERE!)

Go for it.