Akura, bread making is easy, I do it all the time. Looking at your pic, it's a bit hard to tell, but I'd hazard either too little water, or not enough kneading. Also, when you put it on the pan, if you don't have a loaf tin, try and fold or roll the dough such that the skin is under tension, as it will help it hold its shape better.
Use the following ratios (although I STRONGLY recommend halving it until you've gotten some practice in).
1 kg flour (baking flour for best results)
3 tsp salt.
3 tsp yeast (I use a tin of instant dry stuff that lasts for years in the fridge, still works fine)
Mix the dry ingredients, being careful not to poor the yeast in dirrectly onto the salt
(At this stage, you can add maybe 50 g of melted unsalted butter if you want)
Then you add gradually add water until it is just a bit too runny to knead in your hand. Takes about 5 minutes.
Stick it in a bowl (if you use the full 1 kg recipe, make sure it's a big bowl), and stick it a warm place to rise. In winter, I use my rice cooker, half filled with water, and left on the warm setting. Should get decent spring in 2 hours if you've reduced the recipe a bit.
After two hours, take the dough out, it's time to knead it. Wet or flour your hands first, and use a plastic scraper if you have one. Use the scraper to seperate the dough from the bowl, and then using your hands (I actually try to do it one handed, as it cuts down on mess), fold the dough in half, press it down gently, turn it 90 degrees, and repeat. Do this until it turns silky (you'll feel it start to happen as little as 5-10 turns), and then transfer it to a buttered pan (you can use other things, like oil or flour, but I find butter works well). As I said earlier, if you're doing it on a flat pan, try to keep the surface under tension; roll it up like a towel, and then fold the edges under the loaf in the pan works. That said, I prefer to stick it in a high sided, buttered cake tin; much less effort, just shape it until its a round ball basically. All up, takes maybe 10 mins work.
Cover the pan with a lid/bowl/cling wrap/etc to rerise for an hour, and preheat your oven to 250 C. Sprinkle or rub the surface of the dough with water, maybe slash it, and stick it in the oven (if you really want a good crust, put a lid or similar over it for the first 5-10mins, making sure to remove it if it looks like the dough is going to hit it... use a clear lid/bowl here, and check without opening the oven). After 5-10 minutes, drop the temp to 210ish, and cook for the remaining half hour or so. Bread's done when a knife poked through to the middle comes out clean. The larger the loaf, the longer it'll take.
Done. Take it out, leave it to cool on a wire rack (if you can) and enjoy.
Maybe 20-30 minutes actual work, ~3 hours rising time, 30-45 mins baking. Won't be the most subtly flavoured bread, but it is delicious and easy.
Also, strangest food experience for me? Dog. Pretty tasty actually, like pork, but... beefier? Ugly though.
Also had frog (meh), snails (meh), kangaroo (good), horse (good), emu (great), possum (ehhh), crocodile (meh), and a variety of strange Japanese sushi dishes, like sea urchin (
).
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Topic: Food Thread: Kitchen Chemistry (Read 579463 times)