Attempting Bread Magic
ByIf you are anyone that reads food journalism, you know about the No-Knead Bread Recipe. Back in 2006, the New York Times published an article by one of my food idols, Mark Bittman, that rattled the food world. It claimed that it was not only possible, but easy, to produce a bakery-quality loaf at home.
Now, if you’ve ever attempted any sort of bread-baking yourself, you know the ridiculousness of such an assertion. No matter what, a home oven never gets hot enough–your crusts turn out sad and pallid, the texture is tough, and where-oh-where is that lovely, moist, airy crumb? Us amateur bread bakers/professional carbophytes accepted the fact that at home you could very certainly beat the pants off any conventional store loaf, but a bakery loaf could only be approximated. But I was relatively undeterred, as homemade bread of even poor quality trumps foamy-spongy white junk in every case that I’ve experienced.
And so, after absentmindedly polishing off the last crust of a squat and homely loaf, I’d head off to the bakery (Bakery Nouveau being Seattle’s best) for the real stuff. That shatteringly-crisp burnished crust concealing pockets of velvety, chewy innards that, upon the intrusion of a bite, exhale an intoxicatingly yeasty and almost audible sigh. That is bread, and anything else, I’m afraid, is not. It can come close; it can come very close; it is not bread.
The point is that there seemed to be very finite limit to what could be achieved at home in terms of bread, and you just had to deal with it. The Bittman/Jim Lahey recipe claimed to obliterate this fact by simply throwing together a wet dough and sticking it in a pot. That’s. It.
Ever since coming upon this Holy Grail of home-baked bread, I ached to try it. However, crucial to the recipe is a Dutch oven, which I did not own. I did not go out and buy the requisite Dutch oven because I had my heart set on the Holy Grail of Dutch ovens, a Le Creuset. Les Creusets are danged expensive. But I could not settle for less–I had wanted one for too long. So my desire for beautiful kitchen gadgetry won out over my love for bread. It was a tough battle. Bread was sad. Le Creuset, bitterly triumphant.
Then Christmas 2009 came along, and my man fulfilled my enameled cast-iron fantasy. A beautiful 7 1/2-qt specimen in a fantastic gradated gray shade. Now, it was time.
Time. That’s the first thing you need for No-Knead. It’s not a lot of work to get the dough together–couldn’t be simpler, really–but it does take time. I’ll add here that I didn’t try Bittman’s original recipe; I actually went with a newer riff on the technique that was published in Cook’s Illustrated, which claimed to improve upon the original’s flavor and texture. Since nearly every CI recipe that I’ve used has knocked my socks off, that’s the one I went with. The major difference in this recipe is that it advocates for some kneading to create a better crumb, which makes sense. Kneading is what creates that great structure in most breads and pizza doughs. But the recipe is still basically no-knead–seriously, it’s just about 10 pushes of the palm, that’s it. It’s an extra step, but
