STOP Buying Bread. The Cookhouse Loaf That Fed 80 Loggers Takes 4 Ingredients and No Kneading.

The loaf in the bread aisle is $3.49 for twenty ounces and my wife counted twenty-three ingredients on the back before she quit. The bread I ate off the long table at the Cranberry camp for nineteen years had four. Flour, water, salt, yeast. Nobody kneaded it. In the winter of 1976 one cook baked forty loaves a night for eighty loggers, and his ledger says nineteen cents a loaf. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, nineteen of them eating at Shorty's table. I never cooked in a camp. I ate, I paid for it out of the envelope, and yesterday I baked that loaf on my own stove with a scale on the table. The loaf, weighed and priced: 15 oz all-purpose flour ($0.43) + 12 oz warm water + 1.5 tsp salt ($0.01) + 1/4 tsp dry yeast ($0.04) Stir 30 seconds. Cover. 12 to 18 hours on a warm shelf. Four folds, seam down, rest 1 hour. Dough: 27 oz. Cast iron Dutch oven preheated at 450 F for 30 min. Lid on 30 min, lid off 15 min. Loaf: 1 lb 8 oz. Oven gas about $0.10. Total $0.58. Store loaf: 20 oz, $3.49. Mine is four ounces heavier and costs a sixth. Cool one hour before the knife. Pinch off 4 oz of dough before you fold and keep it in the icebox for the next batch. After three or four loaves you won't need the yeast. Honest math: two loaves a week is $1.16 against $6.98, about $300 a year for a house of two. Against the $1.89 loaf it's about $136 a year. Not a health loaf, a cheap loaf. If you can't eat wheat this isn't for you. There's a teaspoon and a half of salt in it, about the same per slice as the store loaf. If you want a soft crust, leave the lid on the whole bake or bag the loaf overnight. I'm not your doctor. Tell me what you paid for bread this week, and who in your family baked it and where. Next week: a camp cook fed forty men three meals a day on nine dollars in 1946. I'm trying it for a week at this year's prices. Eat it hot, friend. It keeps you.