I have been loving the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes series of books so today when we thought that making bread bowls and chili sounded good I went to my bible of bread.
To start with, make your own favorite chili and let it simmer all day on the crock pot (because it tastes better that way).
I then turned to the original Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a day book. I choose the master recipe, the boule, since it was easy to work with and I knew it had a nice crust to prevent it from loosing shape when the chili was added. I tried several sizes of loaves to see what size worked the best. We discovered that while the 1/2 lb loaf was too small to hold more than 1 scoop of chili, it was just the right size as a complete meal.
Various sized loafs we tried
The 1/4 lb loaves were way to small. The 3/8 (or so) lb loaves were just right for the kids.
Fun letters for the kids
All I did was take a sharp knife and cut a circle in the top pushing the blade most of the way in. Then pull out the bread until it was a good bowl. I did nothing special on the inside beyond that. Now you can see the finished product.
Finished product
The only problem? It takes so long to bake enough bread if we were to have more guests!
Mike has been a long-time geek. He started with using an Apple ][e. Later, he used to have to reinstall Windows many, many times on his dad’s computer in order to fix something he messed up. He has been programming in RPG on the IBM i since 2000 and has delved some into other languages including Java, ASP.NET, and PHP....
