No Knead Bread

So it turns out that my wife and I had our application for a new apartment accepted. Its in the same complex that we currently live but its a floor up and is renovated. Yey! The kitchen has all new appliances so cooking will be awesome and I'm looking forward to setting up the new food prep area. From what little I have seen I think its going to be awesome.  If I am correct we will actually have a vent over our stove which is much needed whenever I fry something or grill meat on the stove.

For all my readers that also means that I most likely will not be doing any cooking projects for the next couple weeks. Now don't worry, I'll still be putting up recipes, but I will likely just dive into my recipe box and chat about some of my favorite dishes. Think of it as if the blog is one of those episodes of Family Ties where Alex, Mallory and the rest sit on their couch looking at a photo album and have all those flashbacks to earlier episodes. If you were a regular viewer of Family Ties you would be all "Hey I remember that one".  But if you never saw the show you got an idea of how much Mallory loved clothes and how much Alex loved Nixon.

Anywho... this week I was still able to play around in the old kitchen and make a couple of loaves of No Knead Bread that everyone is talking about.  I have made the basic recipe several times before, so this week I went a little more complicated and made some Boule au Fromage.  That's fancy talk for cheesy bread.  The only difference between this recipe and the basic recipe is the addition of 200 grams of cheese in the bread and some grated Parmesan-Reggiano on top.

There is one difficult with this Cheese filled version of the Boule, the cheese cements itself to the sides of the Dutch over you cook the bread in .  You can get the bread out, but it takes a little doing as you need to break the places where the cheese has adheres to the side of the pan.  The second time I made this bread this weekend I did try to add some oil to the dutch over just before placing the bread into it, but as the oven and pan were preheated to 475 degrees, I got a little oil smoke during the cooking time.  The bread didn't burn, though it smelled a little as though it might have, and the oil did not solve the sticky cheese problem.  I imagine with a little patience one can make sure all the cheese is deep enough in the dough so that it would not touch the sides of the pan, but that is something I will have to work on.

Aside from the removal of the bread from the pan, this bread rocks.  Its super easy to make and its an easily recipe to play around with.  So ill include the recipe for both the basic No Knead Bread and the Au Fromage version as well.

Some people out there might wonder "What is the deal is no knead bread anyway?". "What makes it so special?"  Well I can provide a little bit of an answer in regards to the way that I have been doing it.  This version is based upon a traditinoal french style of making bread.  And that means no additives to the basic things needed for bread.  The basic recipe has just flour, water, salt, and yeast.  That's it. no special leveners, no preservatives. Just the four ingredients.  And when it comes to your most famous french breads, such a baguettes, that is how bread is done.

Traditionally, though, bread must be kneaded in order to mix all the ingredients so that gluten strands form. Yes Gluten, the bane of Celiacs everywhere, but the most important feature of bread development.  Gluten, in part, gives the bread its structure and its chew. Traditionally bakers would beat the hell out of their dough in order to develop the right amount of gluten. the stretching and folding aligned the gluten so that it could capture the escaping co2 your yeast creates as it is doing its thing.

The No Knead method is basically does the same thing but instead of giving the chef a workout, all one does is mixes the four basic ingredients and lets it sit for 12 - 24 hours.  During this time the bread slowly develops its gluten stands on its own. And, as you let your dough sit out on the counter during this time, your bread will invite local yeast in your environment to join the party which means you use less of your store bought yeast and your bread gains a flavor that is particular to your own region of the world.  I think that's cool.

This particular method also makes use of a dutch oven instead of any of the other tricks you might have read about when it comes to baking bread.  When making bread it is important for its baking environment to be moist as well as hot.  One thing this moisture does is it keep the outer crust that forms while baking to remain soft for the first part of the baking time.  Now a bread will rise one final time while you are baking it sometimes even doubling in size. This "oven spring"  as it is called is desirable in most breads that you will make. It gives a bread a lighter texture and develops all those cool holes and spaces within a bread.  Without this moisture, the crust of the bread would develop too quickly and the crisp crust would stop and oven spring from occurring. This will result in a dense and small bread...not usually ones goal.

Lots of people will put either a pan of hot water in the bottom of their oven, or drop a couple ice cubes onto their over floor in order to create this steam within the oven.  These techniques work fine, but after years the ice cube method could start your oven bottom rusting, and I hate messing around with transporting hot water to and from an over so I have always disliked the water pan method.

The dutch over method removes the need for doing either of these as it uses the moisture already found in the dough to create steam.  As the dutch oven traps the moisture that is released from the dough during cooking, and it has a smaller internal area as opposed to the inside of your oven, it creates a nice steamy environment for the bread to do its thing in without the need of you really doing anything.  Yay!

So anywho...enough blabbering and on to the recipe.

Ingredients for No Knead Boule Bread

400 grams bread flour
1 Tsp salt
3/4 Tsp yeast
300 grams cool water

for cheese bread add:
1/2 tsp ground black pepper
200 grams soft or semi-soft cheese of your choice cubed in 1/2" squares (I used a white sharp chedder and Fontina)
A couple Tsp of freshly grated Parmesan-Reggiano cheese for top of bread.

Music addition: Kimya Dawson's album Hidden Vagenda

Process for No Knead Boule Bread
1. Mix the flour salt and yeast together in a bowl.  If making the cheese version of this bread also add the cheese cubes and the pepper as well.

2. Add the water to the flour mixture and stir with a spoon till most the flour is incorporated and wet. This should take about 30 seconds to a minute.

3. Place plastic wrap over the bowl and let the bowl sit on your kitchen counter for 12-24 hours.  If your kitchen is cool or you like your bread to have something similar to a sourdough tang, let it sit more on the longer side.  If your kitchen is warm or you would like less of a "tang" let it set more towards the lower end of the time frame.

4. After the 12 - 24 hour rest period your dough will have darkened a little in color and will have a slightly sharp smell to it.  Lightly flour a countertop and scrape the dough out into the surface. Lightly press the dough into something resembling a square probably about 6" by 6". It's not too important to be exact here size wise.  Fold the top edge fo the square to the middle of the dough. Then fold the bottom edge to meet the top edge. You should now have something looking a little like a rectangle. Fold the two short edges of the rectangle to the middle of the dough and press the edges together.  After you have done this you can turn the dough over and you will have a fairly roundish ball of dough cover dough with a light dusting of flour and place a towel over it. LEt rest for 1-2 hours till it has doubled in size.

5. While dough is resting, place your 4-5 quart dutch oven in the the bottom third of your oven and preheat your oven at 475 degrees for at lest 45 minutes.

6. After dough has risen, take dutch oven out and place dough inside. If you wish make a couple 1"2 inch deep cuts along the top of the dough. Place the lid on and put the dutch oven back in the over for 30 minutes.

7. After 30 minutes take the lid off the dutch over and sprinkle the Parmesan over the top of the bread. Place it back in the oven without the lid for 15-30 mintues. When the bread looks nice and medium brown it is done.  Take the bread out of the dutch over and cool on a cooling rack for at least an hour.


Music

While I was waiting on baking the second loaf of this bread I was with some friends chating before we sat down to play some games. We started talking about old cartoons from the 80s andthat reminded me of one of my favorite artists, Kimya Dawson.  Most of you might have heard her music for the movie Juno, but she has a huge collection of songs from solo work and as part of the New York duo the Moldy Peaches.

When I hear her music I think that it is what folk music would sound like if it grew up in "the city" as opposed to on some mountain with some hippys. Now don't get me wrong I love my hippy folk music too, but there is something raw about Kimyas style.  She takes themes as unrelated as 9/11, or video games, or 80s cartoons, or the death of her cat, and created low-fi ballads that get stuck in your head while showing raw emotion.  Her album "Hidden Vagenda" is a great place to start if you are being introduced to her work.  There really isnt a bad track on this album. Highlights I recommend listening to are "Anthrax" (about 9/11), "Parade", and "Fire", but really just choose a random cut and you got a great tune to listen to.  Some are sad, some are fun, you get the whole range of emotion on this album.