No-Knead Bread: Third Time

I made some more no-knead bread last weekend and it was sooooooo good!

Here it is just out of the oven and you can see the cast iron pot I'm using. The ceramic pot that Karen and Dick so graciously gave us broke in the oven while heating up on the second attempt so we bought the cast iron pot. I guess it's not a good idea to heat the pot with the lid on. Lesson learned.



And out of the pot:



The other change I made this time was to use corn meal in the towel for the second rise. This limited the amount of caked on flour on the crust.

My first loaf of Jim's No-Knead Bread

A New York bakery owner came up with a way for regular people to easily make bread as good as you can find from professionals. An article was written in the New York Times about it and it spread fast. Karen and Dick let me know about it and even gave us the crock pot that we needed. Thanks Karen and Dick! Over the weekend I made my first one and it was incredible. Irie and I ate the whole thing!

Ok, so this was actually my second attempt. The first I attempt I followed the recipe exactly and the dough ended up in the trash. The problem was that the original recipe calls for 1 5/8 cups of water and the dough was too wet - 1 1/2 cups of water seems to be the correct amount and many a food blog confirms that. The other problem was that I didn't realize there was a difference between "Instant Yeast" and "Active Dry Yeast". The recipe calls for the former and I used the latter and didn't activate it in luke warm water first. The result was that the dough ended up too wet too handle and it didn't really rise.

I fixed those problems on my second attempt and made this unbelievably tasty bread:



Here is what it looks like sliced. You'll notice the crispy crust and airy chewy center. What can't be conveyed in the pictures is just how good it tastes.



If you're going to use Active Dry Yeast I read that you should use a 1/3 more yeast than the recipe calls for which 1/4 teaspoon. For this loaf I used 1/4 teaspoon and I think the loaf could have risen a bit more so that sounds right.

Here is a video of Jim showing us how its done: