So lately I have been putting all of my eggs in one flying basket and only riding Jetblue. Their jetting experience has won me over from the leg room and 36 channels of television to the Wifi and quality venues in the Jetblue terminals. On one of my last trips through JFK, a windstorm kicked up and ended up funneling three airports worth of jets through JFK’s air traffic control. Caught up in a holding pattern for a while and then, inversely, caught taxiing on the ground, there was plenty of time to watch the NYTimes/Jetblue channel. There are interviews with notable actors and chefs, video journals of 36 hr travel stints and recipes by the Minimalist chef Mark Bittman. Bittman’s ‘Bitten’ was revisiting a no-knead bread recipe that he covered in 2006 with Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bread.
Originally this bread spread like wildfire on cooking blogs for the ease and from-the-hip methods that created an absolutely stellar bread. The only observable downfall, from an amateur’s point of view, is the 12-20 hour sitting time the bread needed to let the yeast do its business. Now Bittman was trying to speed up the recipe by overpopulating the original mix with more yeast. The problem with this according to Lahey, whose standing moitif is that long, slow fermentation is the holy grail to bread making, is that the yeasty beasties start to digest more of the natural sugars in the bread, leaving you with a less ideal, although faster created, Boule style bread. So the two bread-stars put their heads back together and ended up with a three to four hour rising time. So this is with what I shall start.
three cups of flour (std white)
1/4 tsp yeast
1 tsp fresh ground sea salt
1 9/16 cup of really warm water
1/4 tsp red wine vinegar
mix up in a bowl, cover and let sit for 3-4 hours
When the dough came out and fell to a floured surface the mixture was still very loose and sticky. Still I tried folding the edges over and balling it up. This really did not happen in a textbook manner because the amalgam was still so soft that it could not keep shape. Every time I folded one edge over on itself it kept rolling back as it gravity heavier in that spot. It reminded me of a baby that cannot keep its head upright due to underdeveloped musculature. Nevertheless, I still wrapped the doughy ball in a floured all-cotton cloth and will let it set for about an hour.
Thinking about the oven safe potential of my Silit stainless steel cookware, I scoured the internet looked for the temperature ceiling for my pot and could not find one. Oh well, the show still needs to go on. Preheating the oven, pot already inside, to 450 degrees is the next step before the final leg of the no knead bread challenge. Taking the pot out to put the bread in showed no visible damage to the one weak area of the pot: a hard rubber piece between the metal handle and the glass lid. The last time this piece expanded due to high absolute heat while cooking it contracted equally so, and all I had to do was loosen the screw, nudge it into place and then tighten; all back to normal.
Sitting on the counter for an hour, it seemed as if the wrapped dough ball did not expand, but instead, due to the high moisture content, just stuck like mad to the towel. By the time the dough separated from its new cottony partner, about a 1/5 of it didn’t get into the preheated pot, to live forever with the towel. The recipe states to shake the pot once or twice to get the bread into optimal position. In my experiment, once the dough hit pot it already started to cook. So upon a light shaking it changed but was already in its g-spot.
Thirty minutes with the top on, then fifteen with the top off revealed a bread to be eaten. Okay, minus any type of a disclaimer, I say the bread was tasty, but not what will be the acme of my baking efforts. The crust was good, but not some stellar cracked fantasy crust. The rise was about the same you get from a group of high school seniors from the lunch lady….a little rowdy but nothing exceptional. The crumb was a little moist, but that might be due to my impatience in not letting it rest long enough. It was still really tasty for my first excursion into the world of breads.
The next morning the bread I had for breakfast was stellar. I toasted it in the broiler and the crust was still flexibly yet crunchy and the crumb had dried out a bit, making it perfect for blackberry jam. My next foray is already underway with two balls sitting out in the ‘lab’. This time I’m all in on the OG recipe: 18 hours or bust. The second ball is a wild experiment similar to the Mark Bittman faster-bread recipe. Overpopulate the hell out of the yeast but add some vinegar, so there is more sugar for the yeast to enjoy without devouring the flavor precursors from the bread. We will see shortly….
