In a big bowl place 2 cups of white flour (and 1/2 cup of wheat flour if desired), salt, 1 tbspoon olive oil and 2 tbspoons yeast. Get 2/3 cup of warm water and pour it in the middle of the flour. Use a whisk and work with it for about 1 minute.

In the meantime, turn on your oven at 400F for about 2 minutes, and then turn it back off. Then, back to your bowl, pour handfuls of white flour in the mix and knead the bread. Add as much flour is required until the mixture is pretty solid, and well knead.

Get a bread/loaf pan and smear olive oil everywhere in it with a brush or your fingers. Move the knead bread from the bowl to the pan. Place it in the now-warm oven and wait for about 1 hour until the mixture has doubled in size.

Turn ON the oven at 400F, and bake for about 25-30 minutes, or until golden. When baked and done, use a knife to remove the bread from its pan and place it in a cooling rack. You can either wait to cool down and then eat it, or you can eat it hot with feta cheese and olives. To store it for 1-3 days, ideally use a paper bag instead of a plastic bag.

The difference from the traditional Greek way is that they would use cloth put above the bowl in order for the yeast to double the size of the mixture. This procedure used to take up to 3 hours. What the Greek women didn’t understand is that it wasn’t clothes and darkness that the yeast required in order to work, but warmth. This is why I use directly warm water and a warm oven to force the rising within 1 hour, rather than wait 3 hours… After all these years, I still can’t convince my mother to do it my way.