
Ever swimming against the trend, I only recently got around to trying that no-knead bread...you know the one...Lahey's bread, Bittman's article, all the cool kids are making it...or is that soooo last month? grin Like I said, I'm not so hot on following the trends...
In looking up those links, it's obvious that the recipe got a lot of people talking, and baking. That's so cool! As a long-time bread baker, I think it is marvelous that there are so many people making decent bread - many for the first time. Anything that gets people who have fear of yeast (FOY), as many have confessed, baking bread is a step in the right direction.
That the bread people are baking is a crusty, open-crumbed rustic bread, which is often seen as a more 'advanced' bread is particularly sweet. Then there is the personalization; every baker seems to use a different style baking pot and people are adding all sorts of tasty stuff: sourdough, whole-wheat, olives, herbs, and even chocolate-cherry. Even new bread bakers are experimenting with a bread recipe. That's pretty amazing.
round of applause to all the new bread bakers!
I've been working with this sort of bread dough for a number of years: wet dough, long ferment, just without the covered pot in the oven. (I used to bake bread under a cloche, which provides much the same effect when combined with a pizza stone, but even without one, I am happy with the crust my bread gets.) This lack of novelty probably accounts for my failure to hasten to the kitchen when I read Bittman's article. I looked at it as another recipe that used techniques in which I was already conversant. From that perspective, there wasn't anything revolutionary. No need to rush the barricades.
Besides, I am annoyed. Not at the popularity of the bread or anything like that. I have similar recipes I like, I don't particularly need this one right now. What gets me is that there is no movement to let the FOY go, just to shift it to kneading. Come on kids, this isn't tough stuff. Grab the bread dough, smoosh it around for a minute or two, rest it for 20, smoosh for another minute and it's done. Nothing to be scared of and it doesn't even take much time.
Yet, I still felt the tug of possibility: what if I was missing something? When even experienced bakers, bakers I respect, said good things about it, I decided I had to give it a whirl.
So, what do I think? Well, truth be told, it is great food blog bread.
First, it is very pretty, no doubt about that. Visibly crisp crust. Beautiful open crumb. Yep. That's some gorgeous bread. Photographs beautifully, too. You could take shots of this stuff all day long. Trust me, people have. Heck, I have a few of my own. (Hi. My name is kitchenMage and I am a bread pornographer...)
It is also dead simple to produce bread that pretty. The slack dough, long ferment, and baking method combine to make a very forgiving recipe. Served still warm with a slather of butter, it's an impressive loaf, especially for someone who seldom, or never, bakes.
Well, except in one aspect. It tastes like...not much. It's not even bad enough to be notable. Flavorless, gummy, and an hour out of the oven the crust starts to toughen. Bread to make you believe in the Atkins diet. This is revolutionary?
I made two batches -just in case I screwed up the first - refrigerating the second one while it fermented to see if it made any difference in flavor, as it does with pain la ancienne. Well...no, not so much.
There was a moment of self-examination, second guessing my baking skills (is it just me, everyone else seems to love this bread...did i just leave out the salt? both times?) But you know what? David Lebovitz agrees with me. And so does the lovely bird-kisser at Food Migration whose name I can neither recall nor find. I also found this at Food Migration: "...if you don't knead it with your own two hands, how do you get the love into it?" Many of the mages at whose floury elbows I apprenticed would totally agree!
Yet I was determined to find something of value in this experience, because there must be something useful to pass along. So here you go, two things about no knead bread.
The dough on the left was fermented on the counter, the one on the in the refrigerator, something that usually improves flavor. Not so much here. What it did do, however, is make the dough much easier to work with. I weighed ingredients for both batches so they are within a few grams of each other, but look at the difference between them!
The loaf on the left is this oozy ball of wet, while the one on the right let me fold it (also good for gluten development) and 30 minutes later you could still see the fold! There was no visible difference in the texture of the bread or how much it rose...and they tasted the same, for whatever that's worth.
The other thing that was helpful was letting the dough rise on the parchment paper it was to be baked on. Yes, even inside the dutch oven. I simply placed a parchment sheet inside the basket I put the dough in to rise and put the dough on top of that. When I was ready to bake, I lifted the parchment and put it directly in the preheated dutch oven. No deflated bread from moving it off the rising surface and no sticky mess to clean up. Now, that is, even if not revolutionary, a simple change in the recipe that would make it less hassle. Maybe you could use the two minutes you save on cleanup to do something else bread related...like knead it.