Recipe: Whole wheat no-knead bread (for Liz) 25 January 2007 11:28 am
Posted by Tracy in : baking,cooking,eating,friends,hungry planet,recipes,tea,vegan , trackbackSorting my Hungry Tracy data into food groups and counting what kinds of food I ate most frequently (see here) was useful for a lot of reasons, much more than just writing down the daily food logs. My very first observation (a suspicion confirmed even from just writing down the food logs) was that I sure do drink a lot of tea. If tea had calories, it might well be my superfood. (I suspect that there are people out there who drink soft drinks like I drink tea, in which case their superfood is high fructose corn syrup, which could go a long way towards explaining the industrialized world’s weird epidemic of obesity masking malnutrition. But I digress.) Instead, it turns out that my superfood is probably bread, and in particular homemade whole-wheat no-knead bread, of which I ate an estimated 24 servings during my Hungry Tracy week last December — more servings, in fact, than of any one kind of tea! I have more to say about the results of my Hungry Tracy project and my eating habits in general, but in the meantime, to celebrate the fact that I have a superfood after all (one that is in fact a delicious Tracy food indeed, and to my ever-loving surprise, even vegan), and because my dear friend Liz emailed me last week to ask about it, here is the recipe for that bread:
Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread (Tracy’s Whole Wheat Variation)
The original no-knead bread recipe was featured in the food section of the New York Times in early November 2006 (those links may require you to be a subscriber). The recipe rapidly made its way around the food blogosphere and beyond (it was so popular that the Times even ran follow-up article, so I’m way behind the trend in writing about it, but whatever. Mark Bittman, who writes “The Minimalist” food column, got the recipe from Jim Lahey of the Sullivan Street bakery, which has an amazing reputation and deservedly so, if this bread is any indication of their work. Check out the short (and vegan) ingredient list, by the way: this is a real artisanal bread, made with just flour, water, salt, and yeast. The secret is time, and a blazing hot oven, but I’ll discuss those more in the recipe itself.
What You Need (Ingredients and Equipment)
- 3 cups flour: either 2 cups all-purpose or bread flour and 1 cup whole wheat, or 2 cups whole wheat and 1 cup all-purpose or bread, your pick.
- 1-2 tsp salt (I use kosher salt and like salty bread, so I’m up at the high end of the range, but you might want to start with less to be on the safe side)
- a heaping 1/3 tsp active dry yeast (I usually just stick both the 1/4 and 1/8 teaspoons into the jar)
- between 1 2/3 and 1 3/4 cups water (the original recipe called for 1 5/8 cups but that’s not marked on my measuring cup and anyway I’ve found a little extra is nice, especially if you’re using a lot of whole wheat flour)
- a large, heavy oven-safe pan with a lid (I use my biggest, deepest, most well-seasoned cast iron skillet with the glass lid from my big stockpot, but use whatever you’ve got, as long as it’s oven-safe to 450 degrees F)
- patience and 14 to 20 hours, most of which is rising time
What You Do
- Combine flours, salt, and yeast in a large mixing bowl. Pour in the water and stir until just combined; it will be a messy-looking, wet and sticky dough, almost a batter. The original recipe called it “shaggy” but I’m guessing that’s one of those terms that means more to experienced bakers — to me it means “you know, like no-knead bread dough when you first mix it.”
- Cover the mixing bowl tightly (mine has a lid, but plastic wrap is fine) and let rise at room temperature for 12-18 hours. Seriously. Hours. Instead of kneading, you’re letting time do the work of developing delicious strands of gluten, which gives the bread its kickass texture.
- After 12-18 hours, the dough will have grown enormously and its surface will be bubbly from the yeast partying out overnight. Also if you tilt the bowl you’ll see the dough is all stretchy and even stringy — it’s that delicious gluten I was telling you about before. (I’m pretty sure this bread is pretty much poison if you have celiac disease.) Anyway. Tip the dough out onto a well-floured surface and fold it a few times with well-floured hands, just enough to squeeze out the bubbles made by the yeast. It will be super-sticky and wet, and that’s OK. Let the dough sit for 5-15 minutes (wash the bowl out; you’ll need it for the next step.)
- The original recipe called for letting the dough rise between 2 towels heavily floured with cornmeal or wheat germ. I say bollocks to that, it’s messy and I’m not a professional kitchen with a laundry service that takes away my messy towels and replaces them with clean ones: I just let it rise in the bowl instead. (One alternative suggestion from Bittman’s readers was to let it rise on a silicone baking sheet, but I don’t have one of those, either, though a flexible cutting board might do.) I give the dough a few more folds, flour the heck out of the bowl, sometimes with flour, sometimes with wheat germ, sometimes with cornmeal, whatever works, cover the bowl loosely, and let the dough rise an additional 2-3 hours, until doubled in size (I’ve gone as long as 4 hours because I got distracted, but I don’t know what happens past that).
- Towards the end of this last rising period, preheat the oven to 450 degrees (that’s hot enough to get the kitchen pretty smoky, so you might want to take down your smoke detector unless your oven is much cleaner than mine). Also preheat the pan you’re planning to bake the bread in. (The pan will be standing in for a badass professional steam oven, and because it’s nice and heavy, it will retain lots of heat so the bread gets hotter faster. Awesome!)
- When the oven and the pan are at the desired temperature, remove the pan from the oven and dump the dough in. Be as gentle as you can, but it’ll probably be messy, and that’s OK. (If you’re worried about the dough sticking to the pan, you can dust it with a little extra flour or cornmeal or wheat germ before putting in the dough, but in all the weeks I’ve been making this recipe I’ve only had the bread stick to the pan once, and that was more a problem of leaving it in the oven too long rather than inadequate pan prep.)
- Put the lid on the pan and put the pan back in the oven. Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid (and maybe rotate the pan, if your oven’s heat distribution is as uneven as mine).
- Bake uncovered another 15-20 minutes (the original recipe said 15-30 minutes, but like I said before, the only time I’ve had trouble with this recipe was when I left the bread in the oven for too long, so set a timer for 15 minutes to be sure).
- When it’s done, the bread will be gorgeously golden brown on top and sound hollow when tapped. Pull it out of the oven and out of the pan (this step sometimes scatters flour or cornmeal or wheat germ all over the kitchen) and cool on a wire rack or wooden cutting board for as long as you can stand to wait before eating it. For extra excitement, listen closely to the bread as it cools: it will make little crackling noises. So awesome!
And that’s no-knead bread, yet another reason to pity the fools on low-carb diets. Like anything, it gets easier with a little practice, but it’s easy enough (and the results so awesome) that I highly recommend giving it a try. These days I make it two or three times a week, on average, mostly with the blend of flours described above but also occasionally with 1/2 cup polenta to 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour for a result that is crunchy and delicious and very good smeared with a little pesto.
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http://www.allchiara.com Chiara
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Liz
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nutrition in nihon
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jeannie
