Bread Making

My friend Glenn turned me onto a book about making bread in 5 minutes. That's right, real bread in 5 earth minutes. There is a caveat though, it is technically 'making bread with about 5 min of preparation, and then baking it when you're ready'. Not that the authors are trying to get one by you, but they are presenting a very difference approach to making bread. The 'making' part really does take 5 minutes.

On the boat, there are a couple of considerations:

-space

-baking

-space

As for the space on a boat, one must be judicious, prudent, and judicious. Making the the bread means storing the dough if you're not going to bake with it right away. Thats fine. I portioned (proportioned?) the recipe to give me 1 quart of risen dough which then neatly fits in a container in our fridge until needed by our tummies.

The proceedure is wicked simple, which means its fast and easy to contain. Containing messes on the boat is key. The less mess, the less, cleanup. The flour, water, yeast and salt is added all at once to into the plastic container (no mixing bowl = less cleanup), stirred for about 30 seconds with a spatula and then left to sit and rise. Thats its. in about 3-4 hours its risen and ready bake. mmm

We like to make pizzas with the dough, see our earlier pizza pie post, or naan. We now have a little convection toast oven (AC) and have been using it to bake pizzas lately. It works pretty good, and we always have the wok/cast iron option to fall back on if we're on the hook or, on the lamb.

I've also experimented with baking on Vin (the Dickonson diesel heater), but haven't gotten that down yet.

Water filter

We haven't had a need for hot water from our galley sink and adding hot water to it would add more complication to our fresh water system not to mention keeping water hot on demand. We would have to run the water heater all the time just to have hot water once in a while.

So, we decided to use the hot water tap of the galley sink and plumb in a water filter. The water was slightly metallic tasting, but not more than you would get from drinking out of a stainless steel thermos. We went with the Shurflo WaterGuard system. It uses replaceable filter cartridges which is nice. I installed a tee after the water pump- one side feeding the galley sink for washing dishes etc, and the other side feeding the water filter.
I mounted it in the 'Bad Space', a not so easy to access space outboard of the sink, and aft of the stove. Getting things in and out is even harder than with the old icebox. Why the architect designed the storage like he did is beyond me. In many boats of this size/class the space is used as a quarter berth.