Ever since I remember I’ve been always wanting to bake my own bread. My first trial, when I was a teenage girl, ended up with a big disaster and even bigger frustration. I had few more trials later on in my life but none of them ended successfully, until yesterday. I told myself that that’s it, now I have my cooking blog and I have to finally learn how to bake bread. It can’t be that hard and like most of the things it just needs some practice. Oh, how anxious I was when the bread was in the oven. It smelled amazing but my experience told me that it doesn’t mean anything, just because it smells nice doesn’t mean that it will taste well and have a proper texture. My last bread also smelled nice but came out hard as a stone, completely inedible. But now I finally know why. The thing is that certain breads like rye bread for example (which was the one that came out hard as a stone) doesn’t grow well with yeast, it needs addition of fermented sour while other breads like simple wheat bread grows fine with yeast. I don’t feel confident enough yet to start making sourdough breads but after making my zucchini bread I feel pretty confident about yeast breads. This one was my first but expect to see more. I’m planning to be baking way way more breads.

Ingredients:

4 cups bread flour + few tablespoons
1 1/4 cup water
1 tsp sugar
1/4 oz dry active yeast
1 tsp salt
2 tsp dry thyme
1 zucchini

Start with preparing yeast mixture. In a bowl mix dry yeast with 1 tsp sugar and few tablespoons water. Mix well and set aside for 15 min.

Meanwhile grate zucchini and set aside.

In a bowl sieve 4 cups flour, add salt and thyme. Make a well in the middle and add yeast mixture. Gently mix the flour with yeast mixture and slowly keep adding the rest of the water. Mix to form a dough. Transfer to a board and knead for 5-10 min until smooth.

Transfer to a bowl, cover and leave in a calm, warm place fro 40 minutes to rise.

Meanwhile squeeze out the excess water from the zucchini.

When the dough doubled its size, transfer it to a board and incorporate zucchini into the dough. The dough will become more watery so keep adding flour, spoon by spoon until the consistency is fine to work with. It shouldn’t take more than 4 tablespoons. Knead for 2-3 more minutes.

Form a loaf and transfer to a loaf pan. Cover and again leave in a warm, calm place for 40 min to rise.

After that time preheat the oven to 375°F, brush bread with olive oil and bake 30-35 min. You can check if it’s done by sticking a wooden stick inside the bread. If the stick comes out clean, the bread is ready.