No Knead Bread – Roasted Pear and Oatmeal Bread

No knead sourdough bread is super easy on the arms and the Kitchen Aid.  All it takes is time.  After the dust of the holiday festivities had settled, I still had a refrigerator full of food needing immediate use.  This bread began with a little bit of leftover oatmeal from the morning’s breakfast and became something special with the addition of roasted pears that I’d used for a cheese plate a week earlier.

Do I have a recipe to share?  Nope.  Who wants to actually roast pears before making this bread?  As much as I love cooking, not even I would say yes.  The trick is to make creative interesting meals with what you already have on hand.

As a guide, rather than a recipe I use 2 cups of wet or liquid ingredients including some sourdough starter.  In this case the pears and the oatmeal.  I then use the ratio of 5 cups flour: 1 tablespoon yeast: 1 tablespoon salt to the 2 cups of wet for each loaf of bread.  Here’s where it gets tricky – the moisture content is never the same when you are using leftovers.  You want your dough to be the consistency of sticky biscuit dough.  If you are a traditional bread maker who is used to kneading, you know that this is a mess waiting to cover your arms to the elbows.  Don’t fret though, it doesn’t hurt anything to add a bit more flour or water depending on which way you need to go.   In this case time will be your friend.

With these loaves you can see from the photo that I also pressed them flat, sprinkled them with cinnamon and demerera sugar and then rolled them into loaves for the loaf pans.

For more detailed process see my post on no knead sourdough bread.

Annie
Usin’ what I got