Making bread in a slow cooker

My flat doesn't have an oven. A fabulous sea view, but no oven.

My parents recently gave me a slow cooker.

 I enjoy baking bread. It seemed to me that an oven and a slow cooker essentially work in the same way, and so I decided to try making bread in a slow cooker.

The first hurdle was yeast. I normally (like, always until now) use dried yeast in those convenient sachets. My supermarket doesn't sell convenient sachets, it sells cubes of what is apparently fresh yeast. (Google Images and friends on Twitter, thank you for helping me work this out!)

I have to admit, at this stage, I had some doubts about this bread. Using yeast I'd never seen before and a slow cooker instead of an oven, I could think of many, many things that could go wrong. But I had nothing better to do with my morning, so I thought I would press on regardless!

Ingredients: 1 cube of yeast, 600ish grams of flour, a pinch of salt, about 400ml of lukewarm water, a teaspoon of sugar.

Cube of yeast

Flour and salt

Mash and stir the yeast into the water/sugar, until it's all dissolved:

Yeast dissolved into water and sugar mix

Mix the yeast/water/sugar mixture into the salt/flour mixture until it makes a dough. It should look something like:

Dough, unrisen

Leave to rise, covered loosely with clingfilm, until doubled in size. (This took me about an hour, but may take longer depending on how warm your house is. Don't overheat in an effort to speed the process up, because that will kill the yeast.)

Dough, risen

Get your slow cooker ready, punch down the dough, and then put your punched down, deflated dough into the bowl of the slow cooker. I didn't use baking paper, because I didn't have any in the house, but I would recommend it for getting it out of the pot more easily at the end!

In the slow cooker

In the slow cooker with lid on!

Heat on high for as long as it takes to cook - it took my slow cooker about two hours, but check regularly as it's going to see how long it takes with yours. Note that you will not see a crust forming on the top of your loaf of bread, because of the way slow cookers cook - the crust forms on the bottom and the sides - so you'll need to test the top for springiness.

Try not to touch it until you're fairly sure it's set though, else it will probably collapse. (See below...)

Bread, cooking

When it's done, the top will be soft to the touch, but not squashy - you'll know it when you see it, no doubt! Mine looked like below - you'll see that where I touched it after an hour and a half, it's collapsed. I'd avoid doing that, if I were you...

Cooked loaf, still in the slow cooker

Crusty bottom and sides of the loaf

Wait for it to cool before cutting it, else it will go all gummy. This will be torture, as you'll have to endure the smell of warm fresh-baked bread, and not be able to eat it. Resist.

Sliced loaf

Soft, fresh, warm bread

Enjoy!

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Chickpea bread

You know, surprising even myself, it seems to have worked...

From the mess in the last picture, I kneaded it again and left it to rise again (because I only have a very vague grasp of the basics of breadmaking) and it looked like this, which looked almost bread like:

Then I put it in the oven at 170ish degrees and left it til I could smell it (about 15 mins), and it came out looking like this:

Sliced, it looks like:

It's never going to win bread of the year - it's very dry and tastes a lot like you'd expect chickpea bread to taste like. But it's certainly edible, albeit mostly as an accompaniment to savory things. It's definitely got a chickpea taste to it. I don't think you can make chickpea sweets, though I suppose you might be able to make a baklava type thing. Maybe I'll give that a shot next... This bread might go fairly well with honey, now I think of it.

Anyway, I'm calling this a success. It's certainly better than nothing!

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Sunshine and bank holiday weekends

Sun and bank holidays have combined forces and ensured that I've been utterly incapable of posting anything here. Having friends over has meant we had to tidy - our house is spotless, and I've even mopped. Me, with a mop. I can hardly believe it myself.

My experiments into wheat-free cooking continue - I'm trying to make bread out of chickpea flour today.

The dough:

The dough sitting in the warm sun to raise:

I have my doubts, but we shall see what happens - it might work... I shall be sure to take photos of the finished product for you.

While we're looking at photos, this is the best view in the world. It's from the bar I drink coffee at in the afternoons.

You can also have some pretty pictures of flowers - the roses are out in bloom here, and I liked what Beaulieu have done with their roses around the big trees in the park. (We walk through it to go to the supermarket sometimes.)

And one of the large red flowers that grows in the street between here and the bakery:

(All photos taken with my mobile phone, so apologies for any quality issues...)

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