Cheese, Please!

Last Fall Tom and I hosted a pizza party at our house.  It was glorious.  We told people we'd make the dough and have cheese and people should bring their favorite topping.  There was so much food left over.  Tom was eating pizza for two weeks and loved every second of it.  Until he didn't and said he couldn't stand to think about pizza every again.  Yea.  That lasted only a couple of days.

Not only did we have 20 hand-rolled-at-2-am-crusts left over, but we also had four big bags of flour due to Tom's awesome calculation of how much we would need to make all the crusts.  I should have recalled this when he was calculating how much paint we would need to do the entire house and ended up with 17 gallons of extra paint.  Awesome.

We were talking about having people over again and for some reason I've had it in my head for six months to do a grilled cheese party.  I have no idea where this concept came from, but I was determined to see it come to fruition.  And I wanted to make the bread to finish off the bags of flour taking up prime real estate in the pantry, especially since I don't eat gluten.

Tom agreed to the idea of me making all the bread.  I think he started regretting that decision when one week before the party I took over the kitchen with my bread making experiments.  He pleaded that I borrow someone's bread maker, but I thought that was cheating.  So I talked to my bread making friends and one lent me a book, Beard on Bread.  It's a great title coming from James Beard.  My friend told me, start with the basic white recipe and go from there.  It's easy, you'll be fine.

Yea, well he jinxed me.

I tried several loafs several days in a row and encountered various problems--hot water killing the yeast, bread not rising, loaves not being the right size for sandwiches, being too hard, etc.  While Tom was happy to tell me they weren't awesome, he also had no problem eating my mistakes.  That kid hadn't eaten bread in a whole month and then he probably ate five loaves in a week.

Tough job, but somebody has to do it.

I scratched the book because it just wasn't working despite my effort to meticulously follow the instructions.  I opted for a no-knead version that created beautiful boule loaves.  Not to mention super easy and tasty (according to all the guests).  It was so easy that it led to me making 12 loaves of bread, all different kinds.  No container was spared in the process.  I was searching through the whole house finding anything that was big enough for the bread to rise in and eventually the counter couldn't even be seen through my mess.  Tom was probably thinking, "what did I get myself in to?!"

Then came the baking part where each loaf is baked in a crock or pot, or crock pot :)  At one point, I have five different pots in the oven at one time and one of the pots even got deformed from the pressure on all sides.  A small price to pay for all the deliciousness that resulted.

There were so many bread options:  plain, sourdough rye, english muffin bread, cinnamon, lemon-rosemary-parmessian, onion, honey wheat, molasses, gluten free pesto, and even a dill pickle bread that I totally pulled out of nowhere.

Everyone had a great time and came up with some amazing concoctions mixing cinnamon and pickle bread with a variety of ingredients mixed in the middle.  Some people didn't even make it to the stove to grill their sandwiches. While everyone had their fill, we still had plenty of bread left over that is now taking up a good chunk of our freezer.

Here is super easy recipe I followed in case you're interested.  And an incredible gluten free version.  It really was excellent, made with local eggs collected that morning, and kale pecan pesto made from my garden.  I've had a lot of gluten free bread and this was definitely the best and the most bread like.  I will be making it again!