Sometimes you feel the need to center your day around baking.  Or maybe you have company and want to wow them with your amazing baking prowess.  These things happen and it’s important to have a battle plan.  On major time saver is the amazing versatility of bread.  Specifically, we’ll look at how we can make several bread products with only one dough.

The plan for today is lunch, tea and dinner.  Naturally we have to start with our dough.  This is best made the night before and refrigerated overnight, but it could easily be done early in the morning, as well.

Ingredients

600g Bread flour
20g Honey
12g Salt
20g Instant Yeast
100g Olive Oil
300g Water

Mix and knead the dough and either chill overnight or allow to rise at room temperature until doubled in bulk.  From there we start with a snack.  Crackers and a good cheese.  Take 125 grams of your dough and gently roll on to the under side of a baking pan until it drapes over the sides.  It wont seem like that small a potion of dough will stretch that far, but if your dough is strong and you have patience, you can get it thin enough to be translucent.

Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and fresh ground pepper.  Bake 350° for ten to fifteen minutes or until golden brown.  Break apart and store in an airtight container until you can get yourself some truly excellent cheese.

Next is lunch.  Let’s embrace the fall season with some special focaccia.  Take 500g of dough out of the fridge and roll to a nice circle, about an inch thick. Brush with olive oil and arrange thinly sliced apples all around the top.  Finish with rosemary and just a hint of salt.  Allow to rise and bake at 350° for about half an hour.  Once baked we have the perfect base for a damn awesome sandwich.

We still have a healthy chunk of dough left, of course.  Personally I can’t think of anything better to do than roll it extra flat and make a pizza out of it.

So there you have it; one dough with three applications.  I’m sure we could add a few more too, but I think we’ll save that for another day.