I am the village idiot when it comes to making bread. I have either made rolls that could double over as weapons grade tank shells or loafs that are like that astronaut freeze dried ice cream we all thought was really cool when we were kids (you have never been to Epcot Center?). This last week was a complete breakthrough in my artisan brick (or bread) making ability. I had a brief conversation with a friend of mine who happens to be a commercial baker and she gave me 3 tips that took me from the village idiot to the medicine man of the crusty loaf.

Start with ascorbic acid. Yes, good bread requires acid. You may also know this as vitamin C. Vitamin C is a dough stabilizer. It turbo charges the rising of the yeast and also helps with freshness. After you drop some acid in the bread dough, don’t mix it too long. I have a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dough hook and bowl. I mix the dough no longer than 6 minutes. The first minute is mixing the wet and dry ingredients and the last 5 are kneading. Speaking of wet and dry, add your dry ingredients to your wet. In other words, start with your yeast/water mixture in the mixing bowl and then add the flour.

With all that said, here is the village idiot-proof vegan bread recipe:

• 3 cups of bread flour (if you want to be the village idiot,  use all-purpose flour )
• 2 1/4 tsp (one package) active dry yeast
• 1 tsp of sugar
• 1 3/4 cups of water (a little more or less)
• 1 1/4 teaspoons of salt (that 1/4 makes a difference)
• 1/8 tsp of ascorbic acid (you can buy this in powder form or just pulverize a vitamin C tablet)

Do this exactly as I say or risk becoming the village idiot:

Pour the yeast and sugar into a 1 cup measuring cup. Add hot water until the cup is almost full. The water should be almost too hot to the touch. Stir the mixture in the cup and let it sit. In a bowl, add the flour, salt, and vitamin C. Wait about 5 minutes. The yeast mixture should have a foamy surface about 1/4 inch thick (kinda like the thickness of a head on a Guinness). Pour the yeast mixture into the Kitchen Aid bowl (with dough hook) and turn on the mixer to the lowest speed. Gradually add all the flour. Start pouring in the remaining 3/4 cup of hot water a shot at a time. Be patient until all the water is absorbed (you may not need it all). Keep on adding water until all the dough mixes. This should be happening in under 1 minute. The dough should wrap around the dough hook and not stick to the bottom of the bowl as it spins. If it does, add pinches of flour and wait. Repeat until the stickiness stops. Eventually, the bowl should be spotless without any residue as the dough has picked up all this up. Let the dough spin on the hook for no more than 5 minutes. Stop the mixer after 5 minutes and feel the dough. It should be soft enough to *almost* stick on your fingers, but it won’t.

Remove the dough from the hook and the bowl. Knead it a couple times into a ball. Spray the mixer bowl with Pam and drop the dough back in. Cover and let it rise for 45 minutes or until it is roughly twice the size. I put the bowl on the stove-top and turn on the oven to 200 degrees. The heat from the oven vents warms the stove-top and helps the bread rise. Ideally, bread dough should proof above 80 degrees.

Take the dough out of the bowl and shape it into a loaf on a cookie sheet or a Pampered Chef baking stone (the best). Don’t manhandle it too much. I gently shape it into an oval, making sure not to squeeze all the air (or CO2, really) out of it. From there, put a couple toothpicks in the dough and gently place a couple sheets of plastic wrap over it. It should look like a tent. Put the baking sheet on the stove top and let it rise for 2 hours until it is doubled in size.

Fifteen minutes before baking, put a brownie pan with some water on the bottom tray of the oven. The water will start to boil and make steam. The steam will help give the bread a nice hard crust, but not dry it out. Get the oven up to 425 degrees. Remove the plastic wrap from the baking sheet and stick it in the oven. Bake the bread for 25 minutes. The crust should be light golden brown. Remove the bread from the oven and place it on a cooling rack for at least 20 minutes. This will enable the crust to settle.

If you have made it this far, you should have a kitchen that smells like a Parisian bakery. The vegan bread should have a warm and soft center with a nice and chewy crust. There should be a good yeast and salt flavor to the bread.

I have made this vegan bread 3 days in a row now and it has turned out exactly the same. Our days of paying $5.99 for a Panera loaf may be over. Hopefully, I will stay a medicine man. I can also cancel my military contracts for tank shells.

What is the vegan obsession with alfalfa or bean sprouts or whatever that stringy stuff is. Have you ever noticed that they only put that grassy stuff on vegan sandwiches? You will never see a juicy smoked chicken sandwich with alfalfa. It is almost like a restaurant menu planner is like “Well, they tend to be weird people anyway. Let’s make the sandwich really weird.” When I bite into that stuff, I almost feel like I am chewing dental floss.

Here is a much better vegan sandwich that saves the grass or sprouts or whatever that stuff is.

Green Zucchini
Big fat onion (almost softball size)
Red Pepper
Avocado
Loaf of fresh Panera Sourdough (or supermarket fresh)
Grapeseed oil (Olive is “okay”)
salt and pepper
Dijon Mustard

Cut the zucchinilengthwise about a quarter inch. You should get 3 – 4 slabs. If the zucc is long, cut it in half. You want a good sturdy slab. Cut the onion in the middle and make the slabs a little thicker. Cut the pepper in in half, clean out the ribs and seeds. Then cut the halves in half again. You want to make sure the pepper is nice and flat. To the side, cut the avocado in half, remove the seed, and slice it into sandwich sized pieces. Place all the veggies except the avacado in a flat pan and coat them with the grapeseed oil. Grapeseed oil does much better in high heat (flash point) and does not smoke anywhere like olive oil. It is a great grilling and saute oil. It has some of the characteristics of olive oil in the sense you can use it for dipping (have you ever tried to dip your bread in soybean oil?) and it is great for grilling. Sprinkle salt and pepper liberally over the veggies. Most people are afraid here and under season.

Start your grill and get it to about 450 degrees. You have to get it this hot. Don’t do anything until it is this hot. The biggest grilling mistake people make is that they cook at temperatures way too low and flip stuff too often. Once the grill is at 450, place the onions, peppers (inside portion down), and zuccs on the grill and close the cover. You should be cooking these for 3 – 4 minutes. Flip the veggies after this time and cook for another 3 – 4 minutes. The peppers will have some black spots on the outer skin, the onions should lose the outside layer and be clearer towards the outside, the zuccs should simply be soft to the touch (with your flipper, not your hand) and can be cut with the edge of your flipper.

Remove the veggies from the heat. Cut your bread into nice 1/2 inch slices and coat (with a brush or a paper towel) both sides with grapeseed oil. Throw those on for about a minute on each side.

Spread some Dijon mustard on both slices of bread. Layer the sandwich with avocado on the bottom, followed by zuccs, peppers, and the onions. Make it as fat or skinny as you’d like. Cut in half and serve immediately.

And if you are weird, you can throw on some grassy alfalfa stuff (whatever).

After we had finished our meal the day before, I had about 4 tablespoons of the pesto mix left. We decided to make grilled veggie sandwiches for lunch. I made these two weeks before we went vegan just to experiment with taste. We liked the sandwiches then and we wanted to try them again now.

I took a red pepper, green pepper, yellow squash, green squash, and an onion and sliced them into big pieces. I kept the marinade simple with olive oil, lemon, salt and pepper. The veggies were grilled on our backyard grill for about 15 minutes (7.5 on a side) at 425 degrees. For bread, Aleta brought home some nice french bread. I cut some big slices, coated them with olive oil and grilled them nice and brown.

Back to the pesto. I added 2 tablespoons of vegan mayonnaise (which is quite good) to two tablespoons of the pesto mix. We could have dipped it on the bread right there and called it a day. The sandwiches were crafted with the pesto spread on both sides, squash, peppers, onions, and fresh avacado.

Flavor explosion.