My most serious dietary downfall is bread. Crunchy crusted, holey crumbed and so tasty as a vehicle for pate, jam or melted cheese. I am still a follower of Mark Bittman's no-knead bread, but this new technique takes it to the next level, for better or worse.
Artisan bread in Five Minutes a Day. That's right,
in
Dammit.
So here's the gist of the book. Get a large food-grade container that will fit in your fridge. Make your dough with flour, salt, yeast and water. Thankfully, there is still no kneading! Let rise 2 hours on you counter, then place it in the fridge for up to two weeks. When you want some bread, saw off a chunk, let it rise a bit, bake, enjoy! Easy.
I've morphed the two styles into what I think is the best of both worlds. Here we go....
My container easily holds ten cups of flour so that's what I use:
10 cups flour
5 cups warm water
2.5 Tbsp yeast
2.5 Tbsp salt
(Your container doesn't hold 10 cups? No worries. Look at the amounts, all easily divisible into themselves by twos: cups of flour, half the cups in water, then half again for the salt and yeast but measure in tablespoons. Don't you love math? And who says baking is hard?)
Mix just until all the flour is incorporated.
After two hours on your counter, place in the fridge. The book *says* you can use the dough now, but don't. You will get lackluster results with a crummy crumb. Wait at least a day.
Okay, it's the next day. Make bread. Here I differ with the book again; it says shape the dough and let it warm up and rise only about an hour. I say bof! I think it's better if you let the dough warm up about an hour, then shape it and let it rise another hour. The gluten relaxes more and you get a really nice chewy and holey crumb.
To bake, I follow the no-knead bread way... About ten minutes before you are going to bake the bread turn on the oven to 500F and place your enameled, lidded cast iron pot into the oven to warm up. Then it's 30 minutes with the lid on and the 20 minutes with the lid off and the temp down to 425F.
The best thing? The dough is already made, so there is less mixing, less cleaning and less remembering the day before that I want bread tomorrow.
The worst thing? Ditto. It's just too easy to make bread everyday if I wanted to.
So easy a two-year-old can do it!
Here's a link to the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Hertzberg and Francois.
And here's the link to my prior post, Carbo Load, all about the no-knead method.
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