Knead-free bread. But not mess free.

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bread

I really don’t mean this to be a food blog, but it seems like whenever I have time to write something, it inevitably ends up being about food.

But it doesn’t matter. Because this bread is REVELATORY.

Yes, I said it. (Or at least I wrote it).

And I made it, then I ate it.

This is what it looked like before I ate it:

I don’t have an after photo. We ate the whole stinking thing up in a few hours.

I’d been avoiding the whole no-knead bread before, mainly because I couldn’t be bothered to buy the “right” kind of yeast. The instant stuff that people use in bread machines, if you must know. Lo and behold, I was cruising around the interwebs and found out that I could use my normal Active Dry stuff.

Recipe-wise, I followed the instructions on the Smitten Kitchen, but instead of using 1/4 tsp of instant yeast, I used 1/3 tsp of active dry. I also used bread flour and not all-purpose, mainly because we’re high and dry up here. Everything else I kept the same. And you should be forewarned, I still found this pretty messy and managed to get flour all over my newly cleaned stove top. But apparently sticky is good for the yeasty-beasties! Also, while it takes a lot of time, it’s not actually time-consuming. That being said, it’s a perfect, lazy-weekend-at-home kind of project.

Here’s the recipe, from smitten kitchen. And probably other places, too.

Yields one 1 1/2 pound loaf

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast/1/3 tsp active dry yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. Mix together flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70F/21C.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your hands, gently (and quickly) shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450°F. Smitten Kitchen says to put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. I only had a 2.5L casserole on hand and that’s why mine a little oddly shaped. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

The Verdict: Fantabulous. Stupendifying. European loaf of goodness in the my Desert Town, USA kitchen. Crunchy crust and airy, bubbly middle. And four very happy boulangerie customers for lunch.

UPDATE: I tried dividing the dough in two so I could have two smaller loaves. It worked beautifully. You’ll just need a second casserole dish, but then the dishes don’t have to be as big as in the original recipe.

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Breaking Bread

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baking, bread, food

I’ve heard from many sources (although mostly from my mother) that a house isn’t really a home until you baked something in the oven. So, in order to make this, well, less of a personal web-log on a screen and more of a blog, I’m going to bake something. Specifically bread.  Because It’s carbolicious and I like to live dangerously.

So good. So simple. So crazy hard to get right.

I’ve been experimenting with bread making for a while.  My husband enthusiastically ate my initial endeavours, but honestly that man will eat just about anything, so I didn’t really know how good it was. Then I started to get better. I have a few things going against me though: we live in the desert (ergo, there is no humidity and everything, and I mean everything is drier than what I’m used to) and our altitude is over 4800 feet or roughly 1500 meters. So anything that I thought I knew about bread or that I vaguely remembered my mother/aunt/grandmother tell me about baking bread was out the window. Defenestrated, if you will. And all those fantastic bread/bun/kringla recipes of my childhood simply don’t work.

So here’s what I do (and I know as soon as we leave this place my method will have gone to pot). Bread needs 5 things: Water, honey, yeast, salt and flour. The flour has been the stickiest point for me because flour in the US is nothing like what I grew up with. Ah, Robin Hood flour..I miss thee. I use King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour.  Nothing else works up here in the high desert. Unless I wanted to add gluten or something and that seems like entirely too much work.

Stir roughly 1 tablespoon of honey into 1 cup tepid/warm-ish water. Pour this over 1 tablespoon active dry yeast that you’ve already got in a cereal bowl or equivalent. I don’t mix this because I am lazy.  Then I go have a cup of tea or coffee for about 15 minutes until the yeasties have turned all fuzzy and foamy.

Dump yeast mixture, 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt and two more cups of tepid water into    a Bosch Kitchen machine (or similar) with the dough hook attachment already on. Then add three cups of the bread flour. I mix this until it forms a soupy, pasty-coloured bog and then I let that rest for a few minutes. After that I add the rest of my flour.  Most days, that means about another 3 and 3/4 cups, sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more. Basically once it pulls off the side of the walls of the mixing bowl, I usually think I’m pretty much there.  I let the Bosch knead the dough for another two minutes and then turn the dough out into an oiled bowl. Let rise until to double in size (about an hour on the counter). I take the dough out, give it a light knead and then form it into loaves. Sometimes it actually goes in loaf pans (what I did today) but more often I’ve been making more french bread-type versions on a jelly roll pan. Let those suckers rise again, but not too long up where I live because they can fall like crazy if it gets too out of hand. I’ll emphasize again that this is a high altitude bread recipe.

I bake my bread at 450F/230C. Hot? Yes. But I also put a pan of steaming water on the rack underneath my bread so I can get a crunchy crust on it. The temp and the steam are supposed to work together to do this. This is also a high water content bread, so that’s part of the equation. I’m still figuring this part out, but that’s my routine for now. Until I tweak it again. The great thing about this is that I learn a little bit more about the process every time I make it. And that I’ll never be done figuring it out.