Give us our daily bread...

When I set out to attempt inner-city self-sufficiency exactly one year and one day ago, I expected I’d come to crave a few costly delicacies – truffle-infused oil, foie gras, caviar (just kidding). Oddly enough, the grocery item I missed most was… crackers. I love crackers with any kind of cheese, or simply with thick slices of tomato and plenty of salt and pepper. Salada crackers are my favourite, but at $2.65 a box, that equates to more than a quarter of my weekly supermarket budget.
Last year I attended a cheesemaking course to learn how to make my own cheese, and I can grow my own tomatoes – but I’m yet to work out how to make crackers!
But now I don’t care – because I can bake my own bread and eat bread and cheese instead! In the spirit of sustainability, I’ve “recycled” (some might say pilfered) my mum’s old, abandoned breadmaker machine. I’ve always liked the idea of homebaked bread but I’m hopeless at kneading dough so I figure the breadmaker and I can develop a mutually beneficial relationship. In return for dusting it off and saving it from an almost inevitable one-way journey to the rubbish tip, it can do the hard work and make the dough for me. Then I’ll take over and bake the loaf in my barbecue. (This may seem crazy, given that you can bake the loaf in the, err, breadmaker, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t like the flavour or texture of those fat loaves, with their weirdly uncrusty crusts, that breadmakers produce). Plus, my favourite type of bread is Ciabatta, and breadmakers don’t make long, crunchy loaves.
Because I’ve never made a loaf of bread in my life before, last night I followed the instructions on a bag of Elfin wheatmeal bread mix (just add yeast and water) and turned out a wonderful ball of soft, dough. I kept it in the fridge overnight (not conventional, but it was nearly midnight by the time the dough was done) and then I baked it this morning, having first rolled it in dried rosemary, sage and thyme from my garden.
I’ve got one of those six-burner barbecues with a hood, which probably sounds excessive, but I don’t actually have an oven in my house. (I live in what is, technically, a giant converted garden shed with delusions of being a designer apartment.) I bought my barbecue (from The Warehouse) at the end of 2006, in preparation for my year of self-sufficiency, and it has done me proud. I’ve roasted a whole chicken in it, baked a ham, baked cakes, muffins, pizzas and pies in it – and now I’ve baked bread it in too.
The wholemeal loaf came out looking, well, just like a bought one. The sort of loaf you might buy from an artisan baker – round, lightly brown on top and perfectly soft in the middle. I ate the first slice slathered liberally with a spoonful of last summer’s elderberry and strawberry jam.
Buoyed by my beginner’s luck, I decided this afternoon to attempt my first loaf of ciabatta. I found this recipe online and followed it almost to the letter (I couldn’t find bread flour at the supermarket so I bought a bag of Edmonds Homestyle Soft White Bread Mix and mixed it half-and-half with plain flour, which is half the price).
The recipe told me the dough would be “quite sticky and wet” but to be honest, when the breadmaker beeped to let me know it had done its bit, I figured I was doomed. It was closer in consistency to that gloopy glue I used to make out of flour and water for paper mache projects at primary school. But rather than concede defeat, I poured it out of the breadmaker and into a roasting dish to “rise”. It didn’t, although it did seep to the edges. I left it for an hour, by which time it was more like the consistency of pond scum. What the heck, I figured that if it was a complete disaster, at least I’d have made a long, large, flat cracker-type loaf. Not so much a bread stick as a bread sheet!
Using a large spoon, I scooped half the gloop onto a floured baking tray and left it for another 15 minutes, while I waited for the barbecue to heat up to 220˚C. (I turned the four side burners on, but left the middle two off to create a convection effect). The recipe also suggested spritzing the loaf with water, but I filled up a small baking tray with water and popped that under the barbecue lid to create the necessary humidity to stop the loaf simply turning into a rock-hard block.
But whadda ya know? When I lifted the lid a few minutes later, the gloop had transmogrified into something resembling… a loaf of ciabatta! A flattish ciabatta, but a ciabatta nonetheless!
I still had half the gloop left, so I figured I’d get a little fancier with my second loaf. I sprinkled dried homegrown herbs and sea salt over it and then poked little sprigs of rosemary all over it. Voila! I’m an artisan baker in my own right!