“babcia” is the polish word for grandmother and it was a polish grandmother who taught me how to make bread. so with that in mind, I think I should affectionately call this a babcia bread in honour of that very sweet old lady.
Bread is almost ridiculously easy to make. It’s no surprise that almost every culture in the world makes its own version of bread, though the ingredients and production might be different, it’s really all the same. I lucked out the other day when I found a 10-kg bag of flour sitting under the kitchen table that I just utterly forgot was living there. It’s amazing the things you find when you bother to step back and actually look at something. With the discovery of my heavy bag of foodmaking material, I decided to buzz over to Famous Foods and buy a jar of yeast, since yeast + bread + water + salt generally gives you a loaf of bread.
It’s as easy as that, I promise. If you mix them in the right combination, at the right temperature, and cook them for the right amount of time, you’ll get a loaf of bread. You just have to put in the heart of a happy old Polish gramma, and you’ll have a very lovingly mastered loaf. Please don’t kill any sweet old Polish grammas, though. They’re necessary in this world to teach more people like me how to bake bread.
Babcia Bread:
2 Cups Flour, plus more to mix in when you get confused.
1.5 Cups bath-temperature Water, plus more to mix in when you get really confused.
1 Pinch Salt, for the yeasties to eat.
1 Tbs Yeast, to eat the salt.
Additionally:
You might want some olive oil and non-stick spray or something like that.
Bread pan(s) and bowls to mix bread
A wooden chopping block is an awesome place to knead bread
Damp towel
Polish Gramma, as many as possible.
Instructions:
Take your yeasties and pour them into a measuring cup full of that bath-warm water. Any hotter and you will kill the little yeasties, who just want to live and grow and make bread. Mix it up just a little bit and add some of the salt so the yeasties can eat it and get fat and die happy.
Pour the flour into your mixing bowl and make a well in the centre. Pour the water into the well and use a wooden spoon, or your hands to gently fold the mixture together. You will end up getting gross and feeling sticky and you’ll probably come up with a concoction that’s somewhat reminiscent to Play-Doh. If you want to stop here, and add some green food colouring, you can do so and that’s basically what you’ll have. But you want to continue, I promise, because it gets more interesting from here on out:
After this point, you’ll have a rather sticky ball of dough. Add more flour or water to create a ball of something that doesn’t really stick to your fingers too much, and you can kind of toss around at the dog or make it go “splot!” on your chopping block. It should feel like a ball of flour, yeast, salt and water. This will take time, and you will want to knead it for about 10 minutes depending on how big the ball is. To knead the ball, try turning the edges in on themselves. Or you can go totally gangster and do it your own way. That’s where you need a Polish gramma to teach you, and really I’m not qualified to be a Polish gramma. Usually you have to be Polish, first, and I’m just off to a bad start at that.
Did you remember to pre-heat your oven to 350*F? Because I forgot to tell you. That’s okay, this is my blog and I can do what I want.
When you have a satisfyingly silly ball of bread, keep it in the bowl where you were mixing it and put that damp towel over top the bowl. Over time, the bread will rise. It’ll probably double in size, that’s the yeasties doing their good communist duty. After your bread has risen, give it a good punch in the belly. Knead it some more, and put it into its bread pan. Push it around so that the blob starts to take the shape of the bottom of the pan, but don’t push it too far down or you’ll retard the growth of your bread. Let the bread rise just a little bit longer, and put it in the oven. You can rub olive oil on the top, if you want. I don’t usually because I often forget to do this part, for the same reason that I once made an enormous pot of stew but completely forgot to add any spices. This is not one of my better traits.
Wait a while, the bread will rise. The yeasties will be screaming and yelling for pity. They’re just dumb organisms, don’t cater to their pleas. Spartan wives baked bread because they were ruthless. Polish grammies bake bread because they love you very, very much.
In the end you’ll have bread. It will be warm and will have cracks in the top and everybody will flock to your house to eat it. Pretend you’re Polish and enjoy it! It’s delicious!