No-knead Bread, Take 3

Another attempt at no-knead bread. I weighed the flour instead of measuring, using 300 g white flour and 130 g wheat flour. I doubled both the yeast and the salt. The total water is about 1 1/2 cups water. I'm getting better at working the wet dough (the only hard part is folding it before the final rise), and it's getting better. It still doesn't rise quite as high as I think it should, but it's very good, with an excellent crust. I'll keep making it.

No-knead Bread, Take 2

I made a second attempt at no-knead bread. It turns out that Mark Bittman revisited his article as well with a few suggestions, as well as many comments on the web (e.g. here and here). I made a number of changes, including usiing 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour, double the yeast, a bit more salt, miller's bran instead of flour for dusting, and just a little less water. It was much improved.

No-knead bread

[One thing I like about the new version of blogger is that it lets you backdate the post time, to when I actually cooked something. I am posting this 11 days later]

I got around to trying the recipe for no-knead bread that appeared in the New York Times a while back. I've never been much of a bread baker, but this recipe appealed to me with its simplicity, so I tried it. The dough was almost a batter, very sticky.

The "dough"rose overnight, and was bubbly the next afternoon, when I tried to work it, but it was pretty gooey. All you need to do is fold it into thirds and let it rest before a final rising, but I wasn't very successful getting it to fold without sticking. Then I sat it on a heavily floured towel, and it rose a little, before baking it at 350 in a Le Crueset cast-iron casserole dish.

The crust was great, but it hadn't risen very much. If this had been an attempt at foccacia I might have been more pleased with the result. It also made a huge mess of the towel it was sitting on for the final rise, which may not be salvageable. I will try a few thing differently next time.