Paine or bread is the most important staple of romanian home cooked food. The smell of it when it comes out of the oven is overpowering and makes your mouth water. You can't wait to have a piece of it. You can make this bread too and it doesn't take too long once you've learned it.
(Pictures to be added later)
Ingredients (1 large round loaf):
- 7 cups of flour (any mix of white and wheat as you like best)
- 4 cups of warm water
- 1 heaping Tbs of yeast
- 1Tbs salt
Directions:
1. Place the flour into a large mixing bowl and mix the different kinds together until uniformly mixed.
2. Push most of the flour into a mound to one side. Take about a half cup of the flour over to one side and use this area to do the kneading of the dough.
3. Put the yeast and salt into this smaller kneading area and mix together well.
4. Add the warm water, tap water is fine, to this smaller area.
5. Wash your hands thoroughly and then the kneading begins. With the fingers of both hands slowly start to smash up the flour, yeast and salt in the smaller mixing area. It will be very watery at first but continue to mash everything up so there are no balls of flour.
6. This part is the most difficult of making the bread because the dough sticks to your fingers and it feels like this ball of sticky dough will never look like a loaf of bread. Continue to slowly mix small amounts of dough into the mix and smash it up well with your fingers.
7. Your fingers will become so covered with dough its hard to use them to knead the dough. At this point you can try peeling off as much as you can and putting it in the pile of dough. Then dip your hands in the pile of flour to make it stick less as you continue to put more and more flour into the ball of dough one handful at a time. Keep dipping your hands in more flour.
8. As you get closer to the end of the flour place some flour below the mound to help keep it from sticking to the bowl. Shape the mound into a circle as it starts to form into a more uniform mass.
9. You may notice that the mound isn't sticking together and there are holes in the mound. Grab one side of the mound and fold it over to the other side and then push down gently to try to get the mound to be one whole piece of dough.
10. If the flour is all gone and the mound of dough is still sticky just add more flour one handful at a time until it seems that the mound is full of flour. The exact amount of flour for the amount of water depends on the quality of flour and will be slightly different for one flour to another.
11. When the mound looks like it is done and doesn't need any more flour and will hold it's shape take some vegetable oil and put it into your hands to lightly cover the whole outside shell of the mound.
12. Let the dough rise for 1/2 hour. It should almost double in size, if not then maybe the water wasn't warm enough or your yeast is dead. This will be very rare so you don't really need to worry about it.
13. Bake in the oven at 400 deg F for 50 mins. Look at the outside of the dough at this time and it is ready if the bread is light brown. Every oven can be slightly different so you can adjust this time depending on how you like your bread.
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