Thursday, November 09, 2006

Yeasty Adventure

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.

1 comment:

Mar said...

That looks like some delicious bread!
And it sounds like it wasn't all too difficult to make either.