First cooking post! Badass bread-making

Since we’ve been too lazy to write about our recent roadtrips (and because people keep asking) we’ve decided to start a cooking section on our blog. So this is the first post in Joel Kelly and Leah Sanford’s new “Cooking with the Kelfords” series!

If there’s one thing that makes our relationship what it is (awesome), it’s our cooking. We both are positively in love with cooking and baking. For us, the most important part of cooking is the process, not the result. Frankly, if the finished product is edible, that’s a bonus. The fun is trying new things, experimenting, failing, having fun, and getting covered in flour.

Our tips for having fun in cooking can be summed up pretty easily:

1. Kickoff cocktails
2. Don’t worry about the finished product
3. Crank some tunes or podcasts (MBMBaM is our favourite, with Throwing Shade a close second)
4. Make a mess!
5. But clean as you go
6. Cook for yourself
7. You can always order pizza
8. Learn from your mistakes, but always try to 1-up your last attempt
9. Drink til whatever you made tastes good

We make a lot of bread. Sometimes a few loaves a week. And then we eat it all. We’re 80% carbs by volume.

Most of the bread we make is inspired by the Rosemary Focaccia Bread in the unbeatable Veganomicon. By now we’ve changed and adjusted it so much it doesn’t resemble the original recipe at all, but it’s the genesis of our break-making obsession. One recent adventure had us making amazing sundried tomato buns for our corn and quinoa burgers.

Homemade corn and quinoa burger on a homemade sundried tomato bun.

But today we decided baguette had to happen. Neither of us had made a baguette before, so we headed to the Internet to track down a recipe. A brief googling landed us on Food.com’s “Fresh Baguette Recipe“.

The bread turned out pretty well, for our first attempt. Next time we’ll definitely do a couple smaller loaves instead of one giant loaf. It turned out way bigger than we’d anticipated. And it finished baking in about half the time we’d thought. So perhaps the oven was too hot. 500 degrees seemed excessive, but we were just following the recipe.

Pictures of the bread making are below. I guess next time we’ll make some small adjustments, but overall the recipe was pretty simple and worth trying again and again.

Thanks for reading! We hope we can inspire you all to get cooking. Join us next time on Cooking with the Kelfords for some more culinary craziness!

Mixing the flour, yeast, and sugar together.

Kneading the dough.

Drinking is an unskippable step. Kneading for the full time (8 minutes for this recipe) is absolutely crucial, so it sometimes takes a partner to make sure the beer keeps flowing.

The giant loaf rises on the pan.

Done!

Loaf of bread with Leah so you can see just how giant it turned out to be.

Bread with our supper of dal and rice. Delicious!