The experiment to try and cook bread in the pressure cooker was a resounding success and so today I bought a lot of bread mixes and have measured out and mixed the dry ingredients and bagged them into individual bags. All I'll have to do on board now is grab a bag, mix in the required amount of lukewarm water and set the dough to rise. Fresh bread as often as we want!

For those of you who want to know how I did it, of course I have step-by-step instructions. The first thing I needed was a pot that would fit inside of the pressure cooker. You could use a ceramic soufflé dish or some other kind of oven-safe casserole dish or bowl, but I never like to have breakable stuff on the boat, so I opted for metal. We bought a rather nice medium sized copper bottomed saucepan for 40kr ($7) from the local second-hand shop and removed the handle.

Next, I mixed up the dough. Today I tried a sunflower seed bread, but you can use any kind of bread mixture that you like. Among the ones I now have are wholemeal, rye, mixed grain, French, Greek and lingon bread, Swedish loaf, three grains etc. It needs to be enough to make up a 500g or 1 lb loaf.

Sunflower Seed Bread
3 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp sunflower oil
1 teaspoons salt
2½ cups unbleached plain flour
1/2 cup sunflower seeds. (dryroasted are best)
1 ½ cups warm water
1 7g packet dry yeast

Dissolve yeast and sugar in small bowl with 1/4 cup of the warm water. Place all the other dry ingredients in a bowl, add the rest of the water and the yeast mixture and beat all of the ingredients together to form a stiff dough. Cover and leave it to rise for 40 minutes, then punch down, knead lightly and place in the saucepan. People generally grease the saucepan first, but I prefer to use baking paper - I cut out a round piece for the bottom and two rectangular strips for the sides. Leave the dough, covered with a cloth or plastic wrap for another 40 minutes.




When you cook the bread, the saucepan needs to be raised slightly so as not to burn, so it is recommended that you use a trivet. As I don't have one and have no idea what it is called in Swedish or where to get one, I considered using some crumpled alfoil, but then decided to use some of my metal individual pie forms. These are placed in the bottom of the pressure cooker and add about 2 cups of water.




When the dough has risen, place the container into the pressure cooker. Make sure that it is sitting on the metal pie dishes or rack.




And add a lid. We were lucky that the saucepan came with a lid. If you use a soufflé dish, you can top it with alfoil.




Lock on the pressure cooker lid, then turn on the heat and bring it up to pressure. Turn down the heat to low, just enough to maintain pressure, and cook for around 40 minutes. Make sure that you turn your burner down very low, as a consistent low flame produces a moderate, even oven temperature.




Cool the pressure cooker immediately by placing it into a pan of cold water or letting cold water run over it. Open the lid carefully and remove the saucepan.




Cool the bread in it's baking container for 10 minutes, then invert it and remove it from the pan. Cool for 15 minutes before slicing. Makes 1 loaf.




As the cooking is done under pressure, the amount of time needed for the steam-baking is a bit shorter than when using an oven, and so you save fuel by heating only the pressure cooker. This is an important consideration on the boat. The bread is really tasty. The crust is chewy and the bread is not browned on top, but we were delighted with the consistency and taste. And we are going to spend some time experimenting with seasonings and flavours while we sail until we hit on a few varieties that we like. The very best thing is that we can make as much as we need and also that we don't need to buy any special equipment or find space to store a separate stove-top oven.

Now we have no excuse for loafing around. (sorry, couldn't resist that one half-baked pun)