Communion Bread

I am a pastor and one of my joys is making the communion bread each month. I have several that I like to make this is the most popular. My favorite is the Matzot but the congregation thinks that is too loud!

I weigh my ingredients. This is one cup of all purpose flour. To this I will add baking powder and sugar before whisking together. Recipe below.

Next is the butter. Some of you may be saying, "Are you making a pie crust?"

"Well yes, I am actually."

I even use this as my pie dough. By the way that is salted butter. Make sure that you pay attention to that, if like most bakers you use unsalted butter. You will need to add about 1/8 tsp of salt to the recipe in the dry ingredients.

Here I have a very loose dough ball. You can do this in your food processor, but I find I always add too much water, so I use my fingers and palms to rub the butter into the flour and cool it down again with a few minuted in the refrigerator. It is a pie-type dough so keeping it cool will generate a better texture.

Once it is cool, I use a heavy Pampered Chef scrapper to mix it all together.

I don't start rolling it out at once. First you have to "squish" it together, Then I use my rolling pin to push it out into the form I want. In the picture above you can see the parallel lines of my pin. After the picture above I rotated the Silpat 90 degrees and did it again. Do this several times before resorting to the roller. If your roller sticks, chill the dough. If you are in a hurry, lightly flour the dough. Or you can use a piece of wax paper, but if the dough is too warm it will still stick to the wax paper.

Pressing the dough like this helps the dough spread out evenly without those unpleasant splits that require patching the dough.

Here he dough is rolled out evenly to a thickness of about 1/8 of an inch. You can use your hand to feel the consistency of the thickness. If you want to have some fun, experiment by making several batches and rolling the dough to different thicknesses.

I cut the dough using a pasta wheel.

Notice that I rolled the dough directly on the Silpat so there is no need to transfer the dough. Just slide it on to the pan like below.

I have been experimenting with where to bake this recipe. This time I tried the bottom rack position. Make notes to yourself on these experiments. I know that you really believe that you will remember the details but you won't. Write them down.

Here is the final product. The picture doesn't show it well but the bottoms are perfect while the tops are a little insipid. I will serve them bottom side up and next time I will bake them a little higher in the Oven.

Adam's Communion Bread #3

5 ounces of flour

1 1/2 tsp of sugar

1/8 tsp of salt

1 1/2 tsp of sugar

1 TSP oil

4 TSP of salted butter

1/3 scant cup of water (probably less)

1. Whisk together dry ingredients

2. Blend oil, butter, and flour mixture until there are NO butter lumps left. It will look like a clumpy corn meal

4. Dribble water into the dough until it just comes together.

5. Roll out to desired thickness and bake at 425 degrees until golden - about 8 minutes.

Cook for fun. Eat for life.