Crispy Bacon and Chili Bread
Ingredients
- 200 g bacon, bacon, pancetta
- 400 g (3 cups) wheat flour
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 20 g fresh yeast or 1 teaspoon instant dry yeast
- pinch of chili flakes or ground chili, optional, to taste
- 350 g mineral water, still
- optional: 1/4 onion
Preparation
- Clean the bacon of bones and hard skin, cut into cubes. Fry in a pan for about 10 minutes until it melts and crisps. You can also brown the onion together with the bacon. Place the browned bacon on paper towels and drain the fat.
- Sift flour into a large bowl, add salt, yeast dissolved in 3 tablespoons of water with added sugar, chili and bacon. Mix everything with a spoon. Pour in water and mix with a spoon (until there are no dry flour areas, briefly, for about 30 seconds), the dough will be loose and sticky. Cover and set aside to rise for 2 hours.
- Mix the risen dough with a spoon to deflate it again. Place an oven-safe pot (without a lid) of about 20-24 cm diameter in the middle of the oven. Set the oven to maximum temperature (about 245 degrees C) and preheat it together with the pot.
- When the oven is well preheated, pour the dough from the bowl into the pot, scraping it out with a spoon. Put it back in the oven and bake without a lid for 5 minutes, then cover the pot with a lid and bake for 25 minutes.
- After that time, remove the lid and bake the bread for another 20 minutes (roughly halfway through this time I place a piece of aluminum foil on the bread so the top doesn't start to blacken). Remove from the oven and after 10 minutes place it on a rack to cool.
Tips
We bake bread in an oven-safe pot with a lid, the best is an enameled cast iron pot. You can also use a glass oven-safe pot or other cookware, but in some bread may stick to the bottom. Bread can be baked using the quick method (as above) by setting the dough to rise for only 2 hours, or set the dough to rise overnight and then bake it the next day (as in
this basic recipe
).