[adrian_b]

Until this year I believed that if I would attempt to make bread at home every day I would waste too much time, because I was making bread in a traditional way.

However, after some experimentation, I have discovered that it is possible to make bread in a simplified way, which does not need more than 10 minutes of effective work for one bread made of 500 g of wheat floor (including washing the vessels etc.).

I bake the bread in a microwave oven, in a lid-covered glass vessel. The right baking time must be determined by experiments, in my oven it is 13 minutes @ 1000 W for the dough made of 500 g of floor.

The advantage of the microwave oven is a short baking time and perfect reproducibility. After kneading the dough in a glass bowl for a few minutes, I can put it in the oven and go to do other activities. Now I make at home one bread every day after I wake up, for breakfast.

When baked at microwaves, you can use a leavening agent for a more conventional bread, but even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste.

Previously I was tempted from time to time to buy some commercial bread or cakes, but now I no longer care about them, I like more my own bread.

[CadmiumYellow]

Wow, do you have a recipe for this? I would love to try it!

[adrian_b]

There is not much of a recipe, because the point is to be simple enough to be easy to make in less than a quarter of hour, every morning.

The simplest bread can be made with nothing else than wheat floor and water, by using the same method as described by Cato the Elder, 2200 years ago (except for using microwaves instead of fire).

With the wheat floor that I use (12.1% proteins), I add water that is 75% of the floor mass, e.g. 375 g water for 500 g floor.

The dough is kneaded for a few minutes, until it becomes homogeneous and elastic.

After kneading, it is possible to bake it immediately. However, in most days I prefer to make a bread with high protein content, in order to not exceed the daily intake of energy that would make me gain weight. For this option, the dough must be left to rest for 30 minutes, to become cohesive, than it can be washed for a few minutes, to remove a large part of the starch, enriching thus the dough in gluten, i.e. protein.

I bake the dough in a glass vessel covered by a lid, 13 minutes @ 1000 W in a microwave oven. The exact time will depend on the oven, so it must be determined by experiments. When the baking time is too long, the bread will harden.

Pure bread must be eaten immediately after cooling. Unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has poor shelf life.

Starting from the simplest bread, there are many options. One is to add a leavening agent, for a softer bread. Now, I prefer the unleavened bread, because when baked in a microwave oven it still grows, maybe 30% of what it might grow with an leavening agent, but it remains more chewy than standard bread. Unless you have untreated teeth problems, this is a good thing, because it causes much more satiety than soft bread in the same quantity. Chewing also keeps your teeth or your dental implants healthy, by stressing the bones.

Some people like to add salt to the bread, so that is another option (when that is done, one should take care that the recommended daily intake of salt is 4 to 5 g, so less salt should be added to other food). Various spices or seeds can also be added before baking.

Another option is to make it sweet, by adding sugar or raisins. Instead of mixing the sugar uniformly in the dough, I prefer to deposit the sugar on the flat dough, before baking, and then roll the dough and bend the resulting cylinder into a torus when transferring into the baking vessel. This method allows the use of less sugar, while still producing an intense enough sweet sensation, due to the alternation of sweetened and unsweetened layers in the baked bread. In this way, I use 50 g sugar for dough made of 500 g floor, but that should be adjusted depending on the individual taste. On the sugar, before rolling, I deposit e.g. cocoa powder (e.g. 5 g for 50 g sugar), vanilla essence, ground cinnamon, ground cloves etc. The advantage of this kind of simplified cake vs. traditional cakes or commercial cakes, besides the very short time for preparation, which allows doing this before breakfast, every day, is that the chewy bread, optionally with high-protein content, can cause satiety after ingesting a much smaller amount than would be needed when eating traditional cakes.