phylliscaroline: Easy Ricotta Loaf

The Ricotta Loaf is this month's Bread Bible bake-along project. It's definitely a quick and easy project, if you don't count the waiting time while it rises. In fact it was so straightforward I was a bit doubtful it was really bread I was making. And in the end it reminded me a lot of those zucchini bread type recipes which generally just use baking powder as the raising agent. This is not a negative, merely an aside. The bread was dense and delicious.

The shot you see below is taken about 5 minutes after the loaf came out of the oven. Rose persists in putting instructions in her recipes along the lines of 'before cutting, wait 3 hours until cool'. When my eyes come upon these words they seem to go all blurry. Who can resist hot bread!? Or cake for that matter.

It's a while since I baked this so my memory of the exact process is a bit dim. I recollect that the dry ingredients are measured out and whisked to combine then it all goes into the food processor.

The ricotta is added to the mix and everything is whizzed up with the kneading attachment on the food processor. I found this a bit unusual for bread and I wasn't sure about the efficacy of my 'kneading' attachment but the dough seemed to come out okay.

The dough at this stage wasn't feeling very bread-like but after some time resting and a business fold it felt a lot softer and bouncy.

After some more resting the dough was ready to shape. I couldn't be bothered converting the suggested baking tin measurements to centimetres or actually measuring the tin, so I estimated the size I needed.

It turns out I'm not good at estimating and the tin was a bit big. It took a while for the loaf to double in size, probably because the weather is lovely and relatively cool at the moment.