Ricotta loaf

February 18, 2006

I thought bread baking would be a cheap hobby. What do you need, after all? A little flour, a little yeast. But, no, it turns out that you need a lot of supplies. Rose has 13 essentials in her book, and I'm missing 5 of them. (Although I finally ordered a baking stone, which you are supposed to put on the bottom shelf of the oven and place the bread directly on top of it. It costs over $50, with shipping. And it hasn't arrived yet, so I guess I'm still baking inferior bread.) And today I picked up a new loaf pan--professional grade--that set me back another $20. But I made a good-looking loaf of bread.
Rose describes the dough for this ricotta loaf as "soft as a newborn's skin." I'm not sure I like thinking about dough as a newborn baby, especially when I'm about to put it in the oven, Hansel and Gretel style, but it was nice dough all right. You mix this up in the food processor, using the dough blade, which I didn't even know I had, so it takes about 15 seconds to knead it. Nice bread,too,especially when you eat it in the middle of a Saturday afternoon with pate, cheese, honey, fruit and drink a few glasses of red wine with it.