No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey,
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.
1. In a large bowl combine 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 70 degrees.
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 fingers, 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 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. 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.
Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.
10 comments:
Mmm....slather on some butter, make some hot tea, and we're good to go!
you left out "come to Z's house with your newly baked bread...!" I'll have the butter and hot tea here waiting :-)
OK Z, I have to confess. I have used the Bridgeford prepared bread loaves for baking fresh bread. All I had to do, was let it rise until it was ready for the oven.
I know it's cheating in the home bread baking arena, but that's the extent of my homemade bread making. I'm sorry to say I have nothing more to offer.
I'm sure you didn't mean to have a confessional here, but there you have it! I'm guilty of taking shortcuts wherever I can.
Pris
I've made bread once in a great great while but I'm not that ambitious any more, even for a simplified recipe. Another confession here I guess.
My brother bought a bread maker years ago -- I think it got lost in a divorce somewhere along the way -- in any case he hasn't used it in years, but for a long time he reveled in making bread. You mix the ingredients -- lots of recipes for many kinds of bread are included with the machine -- plop the mixture in the machine and it takes over from there, timing the rising, kneading it as required -- you set it for whatever of bread you're making -- and then baking it for you. Talk about simple! And it is GREAT fresh bread.
Pris, those are delicious! Nobody really needs to make bread anymore with the bakeries we have.
I'll admit I'm sure not a bread baker, but I DO make the best Irish Soda Bread going...got the recipe from an Irishman who owns and cooks in DOWNEY's in Santa Barbara..sublime!
Faith, I've never wanted to make enough bread to warrant buying a bread maker but I know they're VERY popular and make excellent bread.
MMmm. Irish Soda Bread. oh my.
It's really more of a cake, but I love making banana bread and pumpkin bread. Makes the house smell SO good!
So relatively simple but is there anything more enjoyable than a well made fresh bread?
True Ducky, when I was a kid in Los Angeles, I'd be sent to the store to buy some bread. The little market was right down the street from the Langendorf Bread bakery.
Sometimes I was able to buy a loaf of fresh warm bread. I'd open it, and eat it plain right out of the wrapper, on my walk home.
Boy, was that a treat.
Pris
Ducky,well made fresh bread and roasted chicken. MAN, nothing like that combo!
Living in Paris gave me a new appreciation of BREAD (in Germany, of course, too...such good bread but very different than France, mostly)...you go and stand in line for baguette; it's like a ritual for Parisians which I found NUTS when I saw 25 people in line but it becomes fun, really. And, I was lucky enough to live very near one of the best bakeries...
they have real pecking orders there in terms of bread or pastry shops...
Mr z used to call American white bread "Chewing gum"
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