Marti's Bread

Italians love their food. This is a fact. Kenyans love Italian bread. This is another fact. Many friends of us really eat bread (mostly for breakfast while us eat it accompanying dishes like meat, veges or pasta) and they are used to the sliced bread you can easy find in the supermarket. Even us, before, use to buy that one (was ready, cheap and not so bad at taste) but since I'm at home I've time to bake bread and trust me it's a different thing.

First of all I love the fact that whole the house starts to smell of fresh backed bread. It gives to the house the taste of home, of a warm and welcoming place. Then eating something that you know the ingredients it's safe and I'm feeling really free to give to Giovanni (now almost 10 months boy) . Then the taste, the crunchy outside part and the soft inside...well is another thing.

I've always be so so bad in baking bread. We have a bread oven and even if I was following the instructions nothing close to bread was coming out. It was not growing, was not mixing well the ingredients etc. Then from one day it come out. I did a lot of experiments always taking notes of the changes and so...here the recipe...

Ingredients:

300 ml of water

8 pinches of salt

2 teaspoons of sugar

4 teaspoons of yeast

600 gr. of flour (if you are from Kenya I buy the multi-purpose unga of nakumat)

30 ml of oil (palm, vegetable or olive oil)

Put in one bowl the oil, water and the yeast. In another bowl mix together the salt, sugar and flour. Add the second mixture to the water, oil and yeast and mix up to when all the ingredients will amalgamate and you'll have a soft and not sticky dough.

Leave the dough in the bowl to grow for around 20 minutes. Cover it with a cotton rag.

Pre hit the oven and then reduce at minimum the temperature. Bake the bread for around 30 minutes (the crust need to be a bit brown and crunchy).

Switch the oven and leave the bread for 20 minutes.

Serve hot or cooled. It will be good for 3 days (if you'll resist)