Never Buy Bread Again!
*UPDATED* Thanks to our good friend Peter who found a video on the New York Times website for making bread using a no-knead recipe that is so simple, even a child can make better bread than you could imagine. Well, having dabbled recently in making my own pizza dough and for the most part enjoying that (except for the 8 minutes of kneading) I thought this sounded too good to be true.
The Ingredients:
3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 Tsp yeast
1 1/4 Tsp salt
The Process:
1. Combine flour, yeast and salt in a bowl. Stir around to blend.
2. Add water and mix it in until you have a loose, messy sticky ball of dough
3. There is no step 3
Elapsed Time:
Update
Well I’ve been making this bread a couple of times a week for a few weeks now and I’ve come across a few tweaks to the recipe that seem to work for me that you may want to use as well:
1) I typically increase the amount of yeast from 1/4 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon - it seems to rise a lot better and give a greater texture
2) Make sure that the flour is all combined - add a little more water if you have to, otherwise the uncombined flour will cause lumps in the bread
3) Only use wheat flour or the recipe doesn’t work properly. Spelt or Rye flour does not contain gluten in it so it doesn’t react with the yeast as it should. Having said that I have successfully used a mix of 2/3 wheat flour and 1/3 rye flour for a more dense rye type bread.
4) Make sure to leave it in the oven for the full 30 minutes, the times I took it out early because I thought it was getting too done on top the bread wasn’t cooked all the way through.
2 minutes?
Once you have combined the ingredients cover the bowl with saran wrap and let stand for a minimum of 12 hours - if you can leave it for 18 or 19 hours so much the better! When you are ready to bake it, put a lidded pot (cast iron / pyrex / corningware) into the oven and heat the oven to 510 degrees F. Once the oven is hot, drop the dough onto some flour and kind of flatten it out slightly. Then fold the four sides in on itself (note that this is really only so you get the nice openings on the top of the loaf ) as shown below:
Once you have your ball ‘o bread you can take some cornmeal or bran, or seeds etc and dust the top and bottom of the bread with it - this will help to make a super nice crunchy crust.
Once you have your ball ‘o bread you can take some cornmeal or bran, or seeds etc and dust the top and bottom of the bread with it - this will help to make a super nice crunchy crust.Take the hot pot out of the oven and pop the bread ball in there - ‘seam’ side up, cover it with the lid and bake it for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes take the lid off for another 12-15 minutes until the top is baked the way you like it. Then put the bread on a rack and allow to cool, cut and enjoy!
Tuesday, November 14, 2006