Bread, Glorious Bread!

Cooling on the counter behind me sits a round, chestnut coloured loaf. The crust is crackling as it cools. It's been almost 24 hours in the making, and I'm beyond excited. 

I've been baking bread on and off for a couple of years, all from the same recipe (the master recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day). It's a quick, no knead, "artisanal" recipe that can yield a loaf in less than four hours, start to finish. It was awesome the first time I pulled a loaf out of the oven and set it down to cool. Eating bread, still warm, that I had baked. It was exciting. But the excitement faded, and I eventually became frustrated with the shortcomings of the bread that I was making. The crumb (the pattern of holes inside of a loaf) was tight, and it was hard to get a consistent shape. The bread would often rise unevenly, sometimes exploding out one side. There had to be a better way. 

That happened.

I looked for an alternate method and quickly found Jim Lahey's recipe. It seems like this is the one that really made the no-knead method popular, thanks to Mark Bittman of The New York Times who wrote about it in 2006. It uses less yeast and requires a much longer rising time—up to 18 hours. Further, Lahey suggests baking the bread in a smaller, preheated vessel within the oven—a cast iron or ceramic pot, some sort of Dutch oven. From what I can tell (from here, here, and here), this provides two benefits. First, the dough will be hit with a more even and concentrated heat. It'll get hot faster than it would if it were just on a pan or baking stone, and this more direct heat gives it a better spring. Second, the Dutch oven has a lot less air in it, meaning that the moisture from the dough is much more concentrated around the bread. This high humidity environment allows the outer dough to stay flexible for longer, which in turn lengthens the spring time. Steam/humidity also has the effect of transferring heat more quickly than dry air, which relates back to the quick-heat-oven-spring mentioned before, but also appears to be beneficial for crust formation. This, I'm still hazy on, as oven spring and a good crust seem to be in opposition. Though, the spring apparently happens within the first five to ten minutes, so I guess the crust must get going after that. Maybe it's not so complicated. Oh, one final benefit from using a Dutch oven is that it gives you a good mould for your loaf. Cheating? Whatever. 

So, I made it! If you follow the link to the recipe, you'll notice that the video and written version are a little different. I mixed my dough a little more thoroughly than he did, and opted for a rise time of around 18 hours. I used a silicone spatula to get it out of the bowl, and it slopped out pretty easily. I had to use a lot more flour than I anticipated just so that I could handle the dough without it sticking to everything, but I eventually tamed it and managed to do a quadruple fold before resting it in a floured dish cloth. The written recipe has an intermediary rest of 15 minutes, but I missed that. Oh well. I didn't even form it into much of a ball, really. From watching the video, Lahey seems like a pretty relaxed guy, so in his spirit, and seeing as it was a first attempt, I didn't worry about the details too much. I did, however, buy a cast iron Dutch oven. I'd been meaning to get one for a while, but this recipe was what finally made me go out and do it. 

The biggest discrepancy between the written and video recipe is the oven temperature. Lahey says "500, even 515" degrees, whereas the written instructions say 450. I went 475. 

It was a little hairy getting the dough off of the dishcloth and into the pot. It seemed like I hadn't used enough flour on the cloth, and basically the whole thing required a good deal of scraping dough off while dumping it into the blazing cast iron pot. Not the prettiest, but hey, it's "rustic".

And holy shit, it turned out beautifully!

Definitely a step in the right direction! I'll probably try to mess around with the recipe to improve the flavour (increase the salt a little, refrigerate it for a while), but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't proud of this initial result.