Bread

I wanted a nice bread to go with the beef stew I made recently, so I thought I'd try making some myself. There are about as many bread recipes as there are websites on the Internet, so I'll just have to experiment a bit. In this case, I was going for the classic Cypriot UFO bread.


Ingredients
250 g plain flour
5 g dried yeast
1 teaspoon salt
0.5 teaspoon sugar
150 ml lukewarm water
Some olive oil


Directions
Dissolve the sugar in 50 ml of the water. Add the dried yeast and whip well to dissolve. Let it sit in a warm place until it's bubbly.

Put the flour and salt in a bowl. Add the yeast water and the rest of the water, and mix well. This should create a sticky dough. Place it on a floured surface and knead well for about 10 minutes. You may need to add some flour during kneading if it gets too sticky, or water if it gets too dry. At the end, you should have a uniform, elastic dough.

Lightly oil the surface of a bowl and put the dough inside. Cover with cling film and leave in a warm place for about half to one hour until it's about double in size. If you live in England and warm places are hard to find, a good trick is to put it inside the microwave oven (or any insulated, enclosed space) together with a cup of hot water. The heat radiating from the water will make the environment warm enough.

Once the dough has grown enough, take it out and knead it some more, which should bring it back to its smaller size. Now it needs to go back into the warm place to grow again. This time, it might be useful to shape it for baking as it will be going straight into the oven after the second proving (that is, the raising of the dough caused by the yeast).

Before it goes into the oven, you can (optionally) slash the top with a knife. This helps to maintain a nice shape by keeping it from randomly cracking. Put it in the oven at around 480 K for about 15 minutes. Reduce the temperature to about 450 K, and give it another 15 minutes. Of course, the timings probably depend on the size of the bread. A way to test if it's ready is to tap it on the bottom. If it sounds hollow, it should be ready.

Allow it to cool down and enjoy!