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The Artisan Bread Machine – Nonna’s Italian Bread

My first recipe I tried out of The Artisan Bread Machine: 250 Recipes for Breads, Rolls, Flatbreads and Pizzas failed but I wasn’t ready to write the book off. I had made a whole wheat/granola flour bread that smelled fantastic and the crust tasted awesome but wasn’t baked enough. I realized that I needed to ignore the “crust color” settings the author called for and use the one I do always with my machine. Her book calls for “light” where my machine needs “medium”, she is a finicky machine with whole grain breads. So in giving the book a second try I chose a pretty no-fail recipe: a simple white bread. I am still trying to use up nearly 10 lbs of all-purpose white flour before we go solidly to white whole wheat. But I’d rather not waste food so might as well find tasty bread recipes to quickly use it up! And this recipe didn’t fail. It was perfect. Light, soft and I know Ford (“The Teen”) will eat half the loaf happily when he gets home from school. And more so….I put the loaf on and took the toddler and baby out plant shopping while it did its business. Win-win as I see it, we came home to delicious bread to make sandwiches with for lunch!

I will be trying the failed recipe again and making sure it bakes longer, as I really want to try it. There hasn’t been many bread machine books to come out recently, this was printed in 2011 and uses a range of ingredients, from white flours to whole grain ones. If you like baking bread the lazy way check it out! As with most Robert Rose printed books, this one is well laid out and simple to use.

Nonna’s Italian Bread (adapted from page 34-35)

Ingredients:

  • 1 1/3 cups water (86-95°F)
  • 4 tsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 1 large egg, beaten
  • 1½ tsp fine sea salt
  • 4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1¼ tsp dry yeast

Directions:

Add the water, oil, egg and salt to the bread pan. Top with the flour and the yeast. Use the setting for a 2 lb loaf of white bread, medium crust.

Remove and knock out once baked, let cool fully before slicing.

Store tightly wrapped, use up within 2 days.

Makes a 2 lb loaf.

~Sarah

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