February 1st, 2010
It was just over a year ago when I wrote about my experimentation with No Knead Bread. I’ve made it a handful of times since then, the most recent of which was a couple weeks ago. It turned so well that we decided to make it a regular thing, at least initially planning to do it weekly. And all of two weeks in, so far so good.
It really is that easy; forget about bread machines, spend $45 on an enamaled cast iron dutch oven and 15 minutes measuring and mixing flour and water (you don’t even have to be precise, it will still turn out fine.
Sourdough No-Knead Bread
On to the sourdough part. About the same time I decided to make the bread I started to see things taking about sourdough (more preferment/poolish than what people think about when they hear sourdough.) First it was in the context of
pizza, which I plan to try soon and then it was a
blog post I ran across about doing your own starter from scratch. Living in
San Francisco I have no excuse not to give it a try so try I did. The process went really well, I wish I’d taken pictures so that I could blog about it. The starter finished up and went in to the fridge Tuesday night and I had been looking for an excuse to use it since putting it in there. About 11:30 last night I thought of a good one, a sourdough adaptation of the no-knead-bread. As mentioned above the hydration ratio is pretty forgiving with this bread so it’s a great place to play around. After you’ve done it a few times you get a feel for what it should look like and if you change things up all you have to do is get it to look roughly that way. (In reality this is always the case with bread/dough making, the look and feel has to be “right” more than you have to put in X grams of flour and Y grams of water, …) Anyway, I threw about a half a cup of starter in to the flour and then added a cup of water and played around adding a bit more until it looked right and then covered it and went to bed. I made it home about 6:00 tonight and turned on the oven when I walked in the door, about an hour later I pulled out a great loaf of tasty bread. It’s not a strong sourdough, as in what you’d expect from San Francisco Sourdough, but there’s a greater depth of flavor than comes from the overnight ferment of the base recipe. The next time around I plan to up the starter to a full cup to punch up the flavor a bit, regardless I’ll be doing this a lot, probably every time I make the stuff from now on. mmmmmmmmmm
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Tags: baking, bread, howto
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