Your Slow Cooker: The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread
Being a lover of all things bread, I can rarely pass up a slice from a fresh baked loaf. But I had yet to try my hand in making bread in the slow cooker until this week. You see I have been somewhat spoiled because my sister also works in one of the best bakeries in the country and when I lived close to her I had access to all the fresh, delicious bread that I wanted, at half price.
Now that I have moved, I am missing that good bread and decided to do a few experiments of my own to come up with some delicious home baked bread that you can make right in the crockpot. I unearthed the yeast packets from my disorganized spice drawer, hoping they would still be good, and decided to start baking.
With an active toddler in my life, I find baking breads, cakes, and muffins a fun way to keep him busy with a project that he can see from start to finish (I have been putting him in the highchair to “cook” alongside me but soon he will be able to stand on a chair right beside me at the counter). Whatever we are making, the anticipation builds as we put our finished dough into the oven or slow cooker, and watch it bake. And this project involves one of our favorite foods: bread.
We started our slow cooker bread project with a very simple recipe for a no-knead Lemon Rosemary Bread. I cannot stress to you enough how easy this recipe is. In the time it would have taken me to get to the convenience market right around the corner and back with a store-bought loaf, we had the dough mixed and ready to rise. But you could also skip right to the slow cooker part and use frozen bread dough.
In a lot of my baking, including this recipe, I use a mixture of half all-purpose flour and half white whole-wheat flour to make it more nutritious. You may have seen white whole-wheat bread in the store lately too. It’s an easy way to sneak more nutrients and the added fiber of whole grains into your diet, especially for those who don’t like the taste or texture of whole-wheat products.
So we had the dough ready to go in minutes and let it rise overnight in a warm place. By morning it had doubled in size and it was time to put it in the slow cooker (this recipe is so easy that no kneading is necessary). The best way to do this in a standard sized crockpot is to place two long pieces of foil, greased with butter or cooking spray, crosswise in the bottom, so you can easily pull the finished bread out. If you have a larger slow cooker, you can also place your loaf pan directly in the crockpot. We went out in the morning, and several hours later walked into the delicious aroma of fresh baked bread.
It’s so nice to see that foods don’t always have to come out of the package; some of the best foods are the ones we make ourselves. My somewhat messier kitchen was overridden by the look of pure joy on my son’s face when tasting our home baked creation. And it still brings out the kid in me to watch as simple ingredients of flour, water, salt and yeast make the magical transformation into a heavenly smelling loaf of fresh baked bread!
Made with water, flour, active dry yeast, salt, fresh rosemary, lemon zest
Serves/Makes: 1 loaf
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
- 1 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary
- 2 teaspoons chopped lemon zest
- 1 3/4 cup water, at room temperature
Combine the flour, yeast, salt, rosemary, and lemon zest in a bowl. Mix to combine.
Stir the water into the flour mixture and mix until blended. The dough will be rough and sticky.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rest at room temperature overnight or until it is bubbly.
Line a crock pot with overlapping pieces of aluminum foil. Grease the foil well with butter or shortening. Transfer the dough to the lined crock pot. If you have a bread pan that will fit inside your crock pot you can grease that and use it instead of putting the dough directly in the crock pot.
Cover the crock pot and cook on high heat for 3 hours or until the bread is baked through. It should sound hollow when tapped, it will not be browned.
Remove the lemon rosemary bread from the crock pot (lifting with the foil or removing the bread pan). Let the bread cool completely on a wire rack then store the bread in an airtight container.
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