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Link to your collections, sales and even external links
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Add description, images, menus and links to your mega menu
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Link to your collections, sales and even external links
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Add description, images, menus and links to your mega menu
A column with no settings can be used as a spacer
Link to your collections, sales and even external links
Add up to five columns
Add description, images, menus and links to your mega menu
A column with no settings can be used as a spacer
Link to your collections, sales and even external links
Add up to five columns
Add description, images, menus and links to your mega menu
A column with no settings can be used as a spacer
Link to your collections, sales and even external links
Add up to five columns
January 29, 2020 5 min read
If it’s happened to me, it’s probably happened to you. In a pinch you buy some mass-market play-dough. The kid loves it for 15 minutes, mixes the colors up until it’s an unappetizing shade of brown, and you pop it back into the container only for it to clutter up your cabinet and dry out in a few months. If you are like me, you’ve pinned more homemade play-dough recipes than you care to admit, and have made a grand total of zero of them. This is my permission to you to let go of the guilt. Just Let. It. Go! There’s a better way.
Our littlest is blessed to go to a darling Waldorf nursery and most days they spend some time bread baking. I often find the teacher mixing the flour and kneading dough first thing in the morning. Then calmly sprinkling little piles of flour on the shared working table as kids come scrambling to get their handful of dough. The kids knead, play, and chatter. When they are done, the dough is piled back up, set aside to rise, and then cooked for that day’s meal.
Watching this ritual got me thinking about how silly play-dough is. Why do we need a separate dough for play? Why not just use the real stuff and cook it? (Or compost any bits that get dirty?) This, to me, is the ultimate zero waste play-dough.
In this spirit, I began engaging my littles in my bread-baking efforts. In the past I’ve used lots of techniques for bread making including no-knead and the Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day technique. That latter is a bit too wet for my son, who does not enjoy the feeling of sticky dough. So instead, I use the traditional bread recipe from Michael Ruhlman (below).
I let him play with some of the dough after I’ve kneaded it for a few minutes. His play is effectively kneading, and he watches me continue to knead the rest of the dough. When he is done, they all rise together and anything that doesn’t naturally incorporate while rising gets fully incorporated at the next knead.
Come afternoon or evening, we have a beautiful loaf of bread for the family, and he has the pride of having helped. Plus, there’s nothing left over to store, or get dried out. That is a zero waste win.
A note for cooking nerds: if you haven’t read his book Ratio, read it! It will change the way you understand the science of cooking and baking in particular.
This recipe is slightly modified from his, just based on my personal experiences and preferences.
20 ounces of bread flour
12 ounces of water
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon active yeast
Optional: raisins + 1 tsp honey
Enjoy warm with room temperature salted butter (always salted for bread!) or cashew ricotta.
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