I’m a bit of a bread guy. I enjoy a nice hearty loaf of crusty bread and I enjoy baking bread when I have the time. There is nothing like quality bread fresh from the oven. The weather up here in the northeast is starting to cool down and I’ve been able to fire up the oven without fear of spontaneously combusting so I’ve been on a bit of a baking frenzy as of late. While I was surfing the web yesterday I came across a blog post for No Knead Bread and I was intrigued. Tasty bread… little effort? Sounded like just the thing for me this weekend so I’ve decided to give it a whirl.
I mixed the ingredients in my trusty stand mixer yesterday afternoon and left it to sit on the counter overnight, covered of course. When I went to sleep the bread was within about 4 inches of the top of my mixer bowl, this morning it was about 6 inches from the top. I don’t know if that is a bad sign or not but it smells amazing. A long room temperature ferment is a good thing for bread.
So far, following the recipe from the blog linked above, I’ve run into only one problem. When I tried to dump the bread off of the towel into the pot things didn’t.. get moving… as I had expect. I floured the towel quite throughly, no question there, but it just didn’t release. I was forced to scrape the dough into the 450 degree dutch oven. It was a tense moment and I wasn’t able to get all the dough into the pot. I lost about 3/4 of dough in the end. Seems like a tragedy to waste dough…
After taking the dough out of the over and then pot I started slicing. The crust is like concrete when it came out of the oven! I started off with a traditional bread knife with a nice cerated edge. I made very little progress. I grabbed the electric knife and did a little better but getting through the crust was tough.
As soon as I was done slicing I dumped the bread into a Tupperware and dashed off to a pickup softball game. As I was leaving I put olive oil, some Italian spices and fresh Parmesan cheese into a another Tupperware and gave it a shake. I presented this to the people playing softball and it seems to have been a big hit (Pun intended). The light airy interior of the bread is a great contrast to the crunchy exterior and the over night fermentation made for a pretty amazing depth of flavor. I have never done so little work for such good bread.
I’m going to try it again in the near future and see if I can figure out what is going wrong with the towel. If it doesn’t work next time I’ll just try it without the towel. At least then the scrapper will be pretty effective. Scraping a towel over a scorching hot pot is not something I would recommend.
I took a few pictures of the loaf, I’ll will get them posted over the next couple of days.
[Updates]
As you can see, images have been added! I’m fairly happy with how they are framed but the colors aren’t quite right. I’m still having a ton of fun learning how to use my camera though…
Topslakr
A couple of tips:
1) don’t use a terry cloth towel – use one of those kitchen cotton weave towels.
2) if you don’t want to use a towel – let it rise on a silpat
3) if you don’t have a silpat, let it rise on parchment. when ready to put in your dutch oven just lift the parchment and place it all (parchment included) in the pot. That way you don’t even have to “dump”
4) it is hard slicing with a bread knife. sometimes we get lazy and just tear with our hands.
5) try the Dukkah dip that I just posted
Can’t wait to see the pics that you took!
The silpat isn’t a bad idea and the parchment sounds simple enough. Terrycloth is the fabric with all the of the thread loops on it I believe, this was not the kind of towel I used. The one I used was a dense weaved style material. Definitely what I would call a ‘kitchen towel’ not a bathroom style hand towel. I wonder if I maybe didn’t put enough flour on then? Looking at your loaf in comparison to mine you do have more flour sitting on top then I… (Not to mention a stunning top crust)
I guess I’ll have to make another loaf to find out… too bad 🙂
Topslakr