Pompe a L'huile (p. 167)

Mmm, more bread. This time it's from The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook, so it's not quite as labor-free as Sullivan Street bread, but still not too difficult. The English translation is Olive Oil Bread from France, and it's a recipe from Provence, in the south-eastern part of France on the Mediterranean. It creates a beautiful circle of golden bread that is surprisingly fluffy and light tasting on the inside.

This recipe has all the usual suspects for making bread (flour, yeast, salt) but also contains more cake-like ingredients like milk, sugar and eggs. I started by creating a well filled with milk and yeast inside of my flour and let that mixture sit while combining, in a separate bowl, eggs, sugar and salt. To the wet ingredients, I added olive oil and orange zest. The recipe also calls for orange-flower water, which, when I was making my shopping list, I somehow skipped over deciding that I could craft that myself out of water and orange juice. Once I actually started making the recipe I realized I was crazy and called my mom, who said that orange-flower water can't be faked with other ingredients and that if I didn't have it I should just leave it out. Done.

Once the wet ingredients are all combined, I poured them over the flour/milk/yeast combination and stirred them all together until it resembled dough. I kneaded it and let it sit for two hours, and then punched it down again and let it sit for an hour and a half.

Around this time (9:00ish last night) I realized that if I finished the bread I would be up until the wee hours of the morning. Altogether it rises three times for about 6 hours altogether. I'm not a night person, and wasn't willing to set my alarm to wake up at 11:30 p.m. to put the bread in the oven, so I let the bread have its last rise over night, inside of a round cake pan.

This morning when I woke up the dough had risen beautifully, so I cut some crosshatch slashes in the top and threw it in the oven.

The whole house smelled amazing, but I couldn't quite figure out what it smelled like. Once I cut into the bread and saw the consistency, I realized that it smells (and tastes) a lot like croissants, but with a  slight citrus flavor. I'm looking forward to eating it for breakfast tomorrow morning with a little bit of jam. So good.

orange -- $.59

Total Cost of Pompe a L'huile: $.59