You know how sometimes you think a recipe is going to be so easy you don’t think it through and just kind of wing it? And then it seems like one thing after another goes wrong or not really wrong but just not right and it turns out that there’s nothing wrong with the recipe, it’s just that the cook is an idiot? Yeah, me neither.
A while back I found a recipe for No-Knead Bread via the Farmgirl Fare blog which originated with the New York Times in 2006 and which they got from some other guy (who is probably a pretty good baker because Farmgirl Susan really likes his stuff and I think she knows her stuff, but I don’t know him).
Anyway, I’ve been meaning to try this recipe for months and I finally made time for it this weekend. In between baking the cookies and fixing tacos for dinner yesterday, I threw the batter together. After all it’s only flour, yeast, salt and water and I’ve baked bread before, so no big deal.
Mixing the batter
I discovered I didn’t have enough bread flour and practically no all-purpose flour either (see cookies and cranberry bread). No worries, I just added a cup of whole wheat flour. And I threw in an extra pinch of instant yeast just to make sure. Mixed it up and set it aside to rise overnight. I expected to find it bubbling and overflowing the mixing bowl this morning. Like the time I made waffles with yeast and left the batter to rest overnight. An hour later, the plastic lid blew off the bowl from all the yeasty goodness.
Which it might have done if I hadn’t turned the thermostat down to 66 degrees before going to bed. The recipe recommends a 70-degree room.
So the batter went into the oven to finish proofing this morning. It never did rise as much as I thought it should, but after a couple hours I got tired of waiting for it to do something so I moved on to the next step. I got out my Pyrex casserole for baking. The recipe wants you to put the empty baking pot into the oven while it preheats to 450 degrees.
And discovered that my 2.5 quart Pyrex dish was a teeny tiny bit smaller than the 6-to-8 quart pot the recipe called for. Anything I have that big is non-stick which shouldn’t go into a 450 degree oven.
So, I decided to punt (again). I divided the very sticky dough in two and used both my slow cooker pot and the Pyrex casserole and hoped to hell neither one of them cracked while preheating in the oven.
Putting empty pots into an oven seems so-not-a-good-idea to me. I couldn’t stand the suspense of waiting for them to explode so I left the kitchen until it was time to dump the bread into the pots.
And of course the bread STICKS to the napkins despite my generous use of flour. Muttering nasty words, I scraped the dough off the napkins into the hot pots and threw them into the oven. Only then realizing I’d forgotten to test whether the dough had risen enough. Too late.
By this time I’m so done with this recipe I’ve got a fork in me.
Then wait wait wait some more while it cooks.
The most annoying thing about this whole process? The bread turned out great. Brown and crispy crust with lots of big airholes for soaking up tonight’s beef stew. The whole wheat flour gave it a little extra flavor and it’s toothsome enough without being overly hard to chew. It’s not the best bread I’ve ever eaten, but then we have Wheatfield’s Bakery to thank for that.
This recipe is ridiculously easy if you don’t freak out about the little stuff. I plan to make it again as soon as I buy a 6-quart cast iron pot.
Or maybe not. Farmgirl Susan says you don’t even have to do that.
Some days you just have to accept that you’re an idiot.
I love crusty bread with big holes. Must try that recipe.
It looks delicious and I’m sure it was great with the beef stew! But then there’s a challenge with leaving any edible item on my kitchen counter. I finally devised a “pie safe” in my china cupboard with a cooling rack to keep cooling items safe from dogs, cat, kids and husband. So far, so good. But I’m not sure how rising bread would work … and I have visions after your experience with exploding dough on my china!
This looks just like the bread that your nephew has been trying to make–the holes in it are called the “crumb” or so I am told by the chef in the family. I looked for your recipe–is it posted or did I not look in the right area.
As to the butter-ask JoJo, I am sure he would know if different brands of butter have a different water content.
The cookies that I made for the grandchildren where a hit-I did not think they looked anything like the Toll house cookies Mom use to make all the time.
Love to try the bread for Thanksgiving.