Crusty White Peasant Style Bread

Ingredients:

4 cups flour
1 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. yeast
2 cups water

First Rise:

-Mix ingredients together with a wooden spoon or spatula.
-Spray or brush surface w/oil.
-Let rise 18-24 hours at a cool temperature. Half-way though first rise stir dough.

Second Rise:

-Using an oiled spatula, fold dough several times over on itself, don't stir. Cover with oiled plastic wrap and let rise again until double in size.

Cooking:

Twenty minutes prior to baking bread pre-heat oven to 450 and move rack to bottom 1/3 of oven. Oil loaf pan (or dutch oven) until sizzling. Gently invert dough into pan without deflating. Generously sprinkle with water. Tent with well oiled aluminum foil (or lid of dutch oven). Bake 55 minutes then remove foil/lid, reduce heat to 425 and bake an additional 15-20 minutes.

The Story:

Those of you who know my parents best can appreciate that they can get in an argument over just about anything...including crusty white peasant style bread it seems. One evening, after listening to them bicker for about thirty minutes over why Mom had requested the recipe and it had not been made weeks later, I grew tired of what seemed to be an irresolvable situation, i.e. Mom was never going to make the bread but they would continue this argument tonight, tomorrow night, a week from now, ad nauseam...Being the peace loving, dutiful daughter that I am (and being tired of this particular "discussion") I piped up with an "I'll make the bread!" statement. This was greeted with almost identical looks from both my parents and a chorus of "You don't have to do that hon...your Mom said she would make it" and "I WILL make it" and thus the argument continued despite my heroic efforts otherwise.

Regardless, I had determined that I would indeed make the offending bread despite an enduring fear of failure over anything that required kneading and had to rise three times over about 36 hours! Then I read the recipe...which called for stirring the bread as opposed to kneading, seriously, who "stirs" bread dough and just what the hell was a Dutch oven? After a brief internet session where I determined I would not be purchasing a Dutch oven for $200, that my heaviest duty loaf pan (indeed my only loaf pan) and aluminum foil would have to suffice I proceeded to combine the ingredients and stir them with a wooden spoon (yes, trust me, kneading would not work here). My resulting concoction had far more in common with some sort of pale ooze, seeping slowly across the bottom of my chosen dough receptacle than those perfectly shaped balls of dough I've seen in cook books! Giving my ooze a rather skeptical look I placed the lot on top of the refrigerator to do its thing. Despite its inauspicious beginning, after following the remaining steps of the recipe, my ooze turned into the most beautiful, crusty, delicious loaf of bread I have ever made (granted, it's the only loaf I've ever made completely from scratch but that's beside the point)! I felt like a little kid again when I finally pulled it from the oven, flipped it onto a cutting board, and burned my fingers in my haste to feast upon my creation!