Yesterday's food section in the
New York Times featured a really interesting article on a new, "no-knead" method for homemade bread. The kids have been bugging me for awhile to make bread again, and I was intrigued by the instructions and inspired by the author's enthusiasm, so I thought I would give it a try.
It is a very wet dough, with a small (1/4 teaspoon) amount of yeast. I let it sit our all night to ferment (per the instructions), and got something looking like this.
Before I went to pick Nick up at school, I pulled the dough out of the bowl, folded it over onto itself a couple of times, and formed it into a ball. I set it in a well-floured towel, covered it, and left it to rise again for about two hours.
It is a very soft, sticky dough, and a little hard to work with. But, because you need not handle it much, that's not a big problem. When I got home from school, I put my heavy, cast iron soup pot in the oven and preheated it to 450 degrees. After about half an hour, I pulled the hot pot out of the oven and carefully rolled the dough into the pot. It stuck a little to the bottom of the towel (next time, I might put parchment paper on the bottom instead), but I managed to move it without deflating it too much. I covered the pot and baked it for half an hour. Then, I took the cover off and finished baking it for another 20 minutes.
The loaf was crusty on the outside and chewy on the inside, rivaling some of the best bread I have bought at Whole Foods. Really yummy, really easy. Definitely a keeper recipe.
Marshall bought a gigantic piece of salmon at Costco this weekend, so I decided to make something good with it. I pan-seared the fish, then poured a sauce of Dijon mustard and molasses over the top and finished it in the oven. For sides, I made risotto with porcini mushrooms that a friend had brought me from Italy, along with steamed green beans and corn. Happy, happy!
