BEATING THE HEAT

I tried Mark Bittman's recipe for 60 Minute Bread yesterday.

It's in the cookbook down there on the right.

It's a basic bread recipe of flour, water, yeast and salt.

You just toss those together in a bowl until you get a sticky ball, put it on a sheet pan, let it rise for an hour (or more) and bake it.

In his introduction to the recipe, Bittman notes that it might not be the best bread you've ever had but it's certainly the easiest.

As a rookie in the kitchen I'm always looking for easy recipes so I decided to try it.

With a twist.

I baked it in our air fryer toaster oven.

It's on a rack in the garage and it bakes a lot faster so it doesn't heat up the house like the oven in the kitchen.

Well, I was amazed.

I set the baking temperature lower and watched carefully.

It took less than 10 minutes!

Using a hack I read about on the Internet, I turned on the broiler function at the end to brown the top a bit.

It's not a real pretty loaf of bread because it's a very wet, sticky dough.

I let it rise on the toaster oven's pan so it spread out to fill the space.

But it was quite tasty, very fast and the baking process didn't heat up the house.

Voila!

I'll do it again, maybe using a loaf pan or two instead of a flat pan.