Thomas’s Foolproof Bread (aka ‘Bread made under Frypan’s Supervision)
INGREDIENTS:
1 ¼ cups of sourdough starter
3-5 cups of flour
½ cup of warm water
½ cup of warm milk
1 ½ tsp of salt
Olive oil
PREP:
Prepare a workspace (like a CLEAN cutting board, Thomas) with a light sprinkling of flour and set aside.
If you’re Thomas (or using a stand mixer), lightly oil a separate bowl and set aside. If not, don’t worry about it.
DIRECTIONS (YES, THOMAS, IN THIS ORDER):
Mix 3 cups of flour and salt together in a large bowl. Make a well in the center and add the warm water, milk, and starter to it.
Pull the flour into the center of the well to mix and create a loose dough.
(If using a stand mixer for some reason--we haven’t found or made one yet, but I miss them. They were easier.--mix with the paddle attachment until a loose dough is created. Depending on the mixer, you may have to scrap the bottom and sides to get everything in. Switch to the dough hook on medium-low speed for 3-5 minutes of kneading, or until it’s smooth, silky, and elastic. Add flour and/or oil as needed if too sticky or too dry. Thomas, you are never getting one of these.)
Tip the dough onto the prepared workspace, and knead until smooth, silky, and elastic. Reserve the bowl for later. Add flour if too sticky, oil if too dry. Kneading by hand will take 12-15 minutes.
Oil the reserved bowl and tip the dough back into it. Cover with a cloth or plastic wrap.
Let rise somewhere cool for about six hours, or until it doubles.
Tip onto a floured surface and gently hand-knead the dough for a few minutes. Roll into a ball and dust with flour. Place into a floured bowl or banneton and cover with a towel. Allow to rise slowly in a cool place for eight hours.
When ready to bake, heat oven to 475℉ (246.1℃). Grease a sheet pan lightly with olive oil and gently move the dough to the pan.
Score the dough with as much flare as you desire. (Not funny, Frypan.)
Place in the middle of the oven and bake for 20-30 minutes, until the loaf is lightly golden-brown and sounds hollow when tapped on.
Move to a cooling rack. For a softer crust, brush with milk right out of the oven
submission for the glader cup 2022, day 3, frypan’s kitchen
“We have to do something about this, or I’m gonna go nuts.”
“About what?” Frypan asked, looking up from his cup of Gally’s brew.
“About this,” Minho repeated, pointing at something toward the beach.
Fry’s eyes followed his finger and, predictably, it led him right to Newt and Thomas, sitting side by side against a large stone by the sea, their usual spot. They would always go sit there after dinner, talk about their days and wait for the sun to set. It was an unspoken agreement that it was their alone time and that they were not to be disturbed, at least that’s what Frypan had explained to everyone. The two used to have the same routine during the few months they spent at the harbour planning Minho’s rescue, and Fry had more than once tried to join them, but it had always ended with the conversation falling flat and him having the awkward sensation of third-wheeling.
“It’s been three months since the Last City already,” Minho sighed. “How come neither of them can get a shucking clue.”
“At this point we’re just gonna have to smash their faces together and see what happens,” Brenda snickered.
And as hilarious as it sounded, Fry was convinced those two idiots could literally be the two last human beings on earth and still find a way to deny their mutual attraction. There had been a time when he thought they would finally come to terms with it, soon after they woke up from the dreadful events in the Last City. Near-death experiences often do that; they make you realise that being afraid of rejection is stupid. But, clearly, Frypan had underestimated the level of obliviousness those two could reach.
“Maybe I should just get them drunk,” Gally sneered. “It worked more than once back in the Glade. Remember Clint and Jeff? That was definitely thanks to me.”
And really, it wasn’t that bad of an idea. Frypan himself had done some pretty reckless things under the influence of Gally’s mysterious moonshine; like that one time when he had drunk one too many cups and stumbled into the kitchen and…and…
“I have an idea,” Frypan muttered, before downing the rest of his drink and making his way to his abode, his kitchen.
Did he have everything he needed, at least? Yeah, probably. It wasn’t anything rare or complicated. The simplest thing in the world, really.
Apples.
This recipe had been in his mind for a while, dormant in a corner of his heart. He had come up with it all the way back in the Glade, when Zart had grown too many apples and they were about to rot, and he just couldn’t let that happen.
First he prepared a pie crust, his usual one. He could have done it blindfolded from how many times he had done it, so much so he had forgotten the measurements completely. It’s like walking, you don’t need to calculate each step of it. You just do it.
He blind baked it, and in the meantime, prepared his applesauce.
He also boiled some water, added lemon juice and sugar. Stirred and stirred and stirred.
And then came the trickiest part.
The roses.
It was a meticulous work, to slice the apples thin enough to make the slices malleable but thick enough as to not break them. Folding them in the right shape was even harder and made Frypan wish his fingers were thinner, but after years of kneading dough, you’re bound to build some muscle.
The syrup he had prepared and had dipped the slices in made them easier to work with, and after a couple hours of work, the pie was ready to be baked
As the morning sun rose, Fry realised he had just spent this entire night baking, and during those long hours of slicing and folding and cooking, he had only thought about one thing.
Jack.
Call him stupid, but Fry was just a boy who had spent the best of his teenage years locked in a steaming, boiling, piping hot kitchen with another boy. And he could open all the windows he wanted to allow the smoke of the ovens and stoves out, the real furnace in this room was, unfortunately, his heart.
Frypan had reasons to believe his feelings were requited. There had been stolen glances here and there, too many flour fights to count, and the way Jack always seemed to love whatever Fry was cooking, even when it was objectively terrible; and that one agonising time when Jack had made a little noise of satisfaction way too close to a moan when Fry had made him taste a soup from the tip of his wooden spoon.
And Jack had always loved apples.
One evening during a bonfire, Fry had gotten bold – with a little help from Gally’s brew – and made a candy apple for Jack. He doesn’t quite remember how this night went, both of them had been quite tipsy, but the next morning, he had woken up, his lips sticky with sugar.
It was only natural for Fry to confess with an apple pie.
He had come up with the perfect recipe, a token of his adoration, a love confession in itself. And on the day he finally built up the courage to bake it and admit how he felt, Thomas had showed up. Then Ben had gotten infected and Alby had gotten stung and Thomas and Minho had gotten themselves trapped in the maze and Thomas had killed a Griever and they found the way out and escaped and ended up at Janson’s facility and escaped it too and found refuge in the mall and got attacked by cranks and…well…
Some stories are just not made to be told, so it seems.
Jack was gone, but the recipe had lived on in Frypan’s head, and there must have been a reason for it. So once the pie was baked, he put it in a nice box at the bottom of a basket. Then he added a bottle of his best fizzy wine (from Vince’s improvised vineyard), a fresh loaf of bread (not the cornbread, because Aris would kill him), some cheese (Newt’s favourite, which he had kept just in case), some fig jam that would go perfectly well with it (he had tried the combination himself), any fresh fruit he could find (hoping Newt would thank his past self for this), some salad too (no one would miss it), and overall, pretty much anything he could find.
It wasn’t hard to find Thomas in the late hours of the morning. It was usually the time when he and Minho would come back from their morning run outside the camp and jump into the sea to wash away their sweat. He had probably just done that, since, when Frypan arrived by the beach, Thomas was buttoning his shirt, and his hair was still wavy from the water.
“I hope you don’t have plans for today,” Fry said.
“Um, no,” Thomas replied. “It’s my day off. Why?”
“Because you’re taking Newt on a picnic date.”
“S-Sorry, what?” he chuckled nervously, and Frypan found it immensely endearing.
“Enjoy your brunch!” he simply answered, leaving the basket in the hands of a dumbfounded greenie.
There may have been a few wolf-whistles that day when Newt and Thomas walked into the forest side by side, but it was nothing compared to the cheers and applause when they walked back to the camp hand in hand.
Thanks to Fry, their first kiss tasted of apples; and later at night, Fry remembered that his own first kiss had too.
Roses apple pie
a pie pastry
400g applesauce
4 apples
125ml water
2 lemons
100g sugar
Blind-bake your pie pastry to obtain a crust (30 minutes at 180°C). Boil the water and add the juice of two lemons and the sugar. Take the syrup off the stove. Cut the apples in thin slices using a peeler and dip them in the syrup for 15 minutes. Once the slices have become sticky and malleable, roll them in the shape of roses.
Spread the applesauce in the pie crust and place the roses on top of it.
Bake 15 minutes at 150°C
Frypan’s advice: you can add some cinnamon to the syrup to spice up the apples ;)
