Cookbook #44: Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois, Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2007.

Finally, one of my contemporary cookbooks! 2007! I bought this book to learn more about a new way of making yeast breads, called the “no-knead” technique.

No-knead yeast breads are prepared by mixing flour, yeast, and water into a wet dough and letting the mixture stand at least overnight. The dough is then shaped gently into a free-standing loaf and baked on a stone or in a crockery pot in a very hot oven. The result is an artisan-type bread, like you would buy from a good bakery in your town. The crumb is uneven and creamy, the crust is thick and chewy and dark brown. It’s amazing. I experimented with  bread baking for forty years but never produced an artisan loaf until I tried this new method.

The method is not only new to me, it’s new to the world of baking, according to this 2006 article in the NY Times: The Secret of Great Bread, let time do the work. I read that article, and Jim Lahey’s recipe that goes along with it, sometime in 2007, but did not try the technique until I saw a recipe in a King Arthur Flour catalog for “The Almost No-Knead Baguette“. I studied that recipe, and re-read the NY Times articles, and then tried the baguette. It turned out great.

I bought the cookbook Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day from King Arthur Flour after my success with the baguette. I tried several recipes from this book, mostly with success. Then I saw a class on no-knead breads offered by the Culinary School of the Rockies – I signed up for it. It was a great class. Today, in 2013, I am totally hooked on this technique. So much so that I wrote about it on my other blog: A Lovely Loaf (2011).

Traditional bread making employs the process of kneading to “develop the gluten”. This means, the gluten molecules move into a side-by-side alignment and then bind to each other to produce the elastic network that gives yeast breads their lift and their texture. No-knead bread making uses time and a wet dough to the same end. Since the no-knead dough is wet, the gluten molecules can move about on their own, but it takes some time (at least a few hours).

Now, I never hand-knead breads anyway, I always use my bread machine for that. So why would I want to try the no-knead method? First, it sounded like a good experiment. Second, once I did it, I found the result quite different from kneaded bread. Usually there are (desired) uneven pockets of air in baked no-knead bread, and the crust is always thick and chewy. No-knead breads just look cool. I still make both kinds of yeast breads; one method is not better than the other – each has its place in my repertoire.

No-knead bread advantages:

• if you are used to kneading your bread without a machine, these breads use less of your hands-on time
• they bake up like artisan loaves
• great for pizza dough and focaccia
• can store the dough in the refrigerator for two weeks

Kneaded bread advantages:

• you can use a high proportion of whole grain flour in your breads
• the crust is soft and easy to cut through to make sandwich slices
• the texture is smooth and uniform (sometimes nicer for sandwiches)
• you don’t have to start your bread the day (or week) before

The recipes I gleaned from the cooking class call for mixing the ingredients for a loaf of bread the day before baking. In the Artisan Bread book, you can bake the bread the same day, or you can let it sit in the refrigerator for up to a couple weeks. This is an advantage, especially if you have a full schedule of work and family and play. Time in the refrigerator also helps develop the bread’s flavor. The disadvantage is that the dough takes up a chunk of refrigerator space.

I made the “Deli-style Rye Bread” from the Artisan Bread cookbook. Since this is a recently-published book, I’m not going to scan in the recipe (copyright issues). Briefly, this cookbook has a plain design, with some black and white photos in the “how-to” section and a few glossy photos in the center. It is clearly written and friendly. I highly recommend it for the adventurous bread maker.

(In addition, there are recipes for items that go with or use bread: Tuscan White Bean Dip, Bruschetta, Spicy Pork Buns, marmalade, kebabs, and more.)

My version of the recipe below is a little different from the book’s, and the directions are written to explain how I make this bread in my own kitchen.

No-knead Rye Bread
makes 4 1-pound loaves

Mixing and Resting

• 3 cups water
• 1 1/2 tablespoons yeast
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 3 tablespoons caraway seed (I like lots of caraway; use less if you don’t)
• 1 cup rye flour
• 5 1/2 cups bread flour (you can use all-purpose flour)

Mix all the ingredients in a large mixing bowl. You can used a stand mixer, or you can do it by hand. Mix only until all the flour is incorporated. It’s really, really sticky. It took some work to get all the dough off these beaters:

Let the dough stand at room temperature a couple hours (covered lightly).

Note: I left the dough in my mixer’s metal cooking bowl and it (1) rose up over the top and (2) stuck to the bowl, making it hard to clean. I suggest moving the mixed dough to a glass, plastic, or enamel bowl that is lightly oiled and large enough to allow the dough to rise to double its bulk.

After two hours, use the dough immediately or better yet, put it in your refrigerator. (The refrigerating step makes the dough easier to handle when you go to bake it, and it adds some flavor as the yeast works with the flour and sours it a bit.) If you decide to refrigerate the dough, transfer it to a plastic container large enough to allow for the dough to grow in volume by at least 50%. Lightly cover the dough in the container.

Here is my dough (in the bright light of the morning), after a couple days in the refrigerator:

Baking

You will need:

• a pizza peel
• a large baking stone
• cornmeal
• flour
• a cornstarch/water glaze (microwave 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch in 1/2 cup water for 60 seconds)
• a baking pan with about a half-inch of water in it

Sprinkle some cornmeal on a pizza peel. Take the dough out of the refrigerator and dust with a little flour (just enough to make it less likely to stick to your hands). Grab about a quarter of the dough: if you weigh it, it should be about one pound. This is a messy process:

This is sticky dough! I had to keep washing my hands to take these photos.

(Put the rest of the dough back in the refrigerator. It keeps two weeks.)

Here’s what the dough looked like before forming the loaf:

Cloak the dough. This means that you take it in two hands, and stretch the outside of the ball of dough down to the bottom, rotating as you work around the dough. (I’ve used this method a lot of times to form rolls; it’s hard to explain. What you want is a smooth surface on top, with the ends are tucked down on the bottom side of the formed ball of dough. It takes about 30 seconds.)

Place the dough on the corn meal sprinkled pizza peel. I had a lot of flies in my kitchen, so I put some plastic wrap on top (with a tiny amount of cornmeal sprinkled on the loaf to prevent it from sticking).

Here is my formed loaf, before rising:

Let stand 40 minutes to 1 1/2 hour (I let mine rise 1 1/4 hours). Dough that has not been refrigerated will take the lesser amount of time. You won’t see the dough rise a whole lot, especially if it has been refrigerated. (In fact, mine flattened out.) Here is my “risen” dough:

At least twenty minutes before you bake the bread, put a baking stone in the oven and preheat to 450˚. Put in on the top oven rack.

Just before you put the dough in the oven, put the pan with water in it on the rack under the heated baking stone. (This helps develop a good crust.)

Brush the dough with the cornstarch/water glaze and slash the top with deep cuts using a serrated knife. I sprinkled it with more caraway seeds. Slide the loaf off the pizza peel onto the heated stone in the oven.

Bake 30 minutes. Voila! You are done.This bread makes great corned beef sandwiches. I used my own dill pickles – yummy. I sliced the bread after only an hour’s cooling, and found it easiest to slice the chewy crust with an electric knife. Since there is rye flour in the dough (whole grain flours break up air bubbles), the texture is more uniform than on my no-knead white-flour only loaves.

I had fun with this bread project. It was a hot day, so I wanted to bake it in the morning and have it ready for lunch. While it rose on my counter and the oven heated, I was off on a bike ride, getting exercise as advised by Jane Brody in her NY Times column (Jane Brody’s nutrition book was my preceding cooking blog entry). Bread baking doesn’t have to mean that you spend your whole day in the kitchen.

Cookbook #35: Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, Vol. 2, Bea-Cas. Woman’s Day, Fawcett Publications, NY, 1967.

This is the second in a series of 12 food encyclopedia volumes. I discussed the first in an earlier post. Briefly, these cookbooks are interesting sources of information about food items and cooking methods. Sure they are dated, but I always find something in them that is interesting or odd. And a good recipe or two.

The first entry in this cookbook is “Bearnaise”. The first interesting entry is “beaten biscuit”. I have never heard of these, so I read on:

“This crackerlike Southern bread harks back to pre-Civil war plantation days when kitchen help was assured, for labor, not a leavener, softens the gluten of the flour in these biscuits. They are baked slowly, are of a pale gold color, and have a characteristically dry brittle texture … There were beaten-biscuit machines, consisting of a marble slab or a wooden box with a double roller and a handle to turn. The dough was put through the rollers many times, or until it blistered and became smooth. Beaten biscuits are part of America’s food folklore.”

Interesting! You can google “beaten biscuits” for updated recipes, if you are interested.

Continuing on to the B’s, I find “beef”. “Beef is the flesh of an adult animal of the Bovidae family of ruminants which has been killed for food.” The section goes on to discuss more beef history, then cuts of beef, cooking times and methods, and recipes. My mother tried and liked the meat loaf recipe, but not the beef with noodles one. At beets, she liked the pickled beets. At breads, she tried “limpa” (a round rye bread) and potato rolls.

The buffets entry is interesting:

“In French culinary language, a buffet indicates a good-size tiered table on which various dishes have been arranged in a decorative manner and, by implication, a restaurant that has such an arrangement. But even in French-speaking countries, the word is also used for an informal restaurant where a quick meal can be found, such as in Buffet de la Gare, “a station restaurant.” In America, the word buffet is used as a term for a meal where the guests help themselves from a table on which the foods are placed in a decorative array. Buffet entertaining has become popular in recent years for three good reasons. First fewer people have servants in this modern era … third, informality is the keynote of much of life today … but buffet meals do require careful planning and special equipment.”

(Fewer people have servants??)

On to cakes. I have enough cake recipes, but if I ever want to make the Chocolate Charlotte Russe cake, which includes ladyfingers, I’ll know that my mother tried and liked it. She also liked the Sweet-and-Sour Red Cabbage.

“Canadian Cookery” is followed by “Candies”. I don’t make candies anymore, but I’m making a note to myself that in this book, in this section is Mother’s divinity recipe that I could never find before! Divinity is a candy made from corn syrup, sugar, egg whites, vanilla, and chopped nuts. I remember divinity from childhood. She clearly used the recipe in this book, as it is marked with her notes. There is also a recipe for penuche, a brown sugar candy, although she did not mark this recipe. I remember penuche, too, from childhood.

Canning, carving, and finally casseroles round out this volume.

I decided to try the “Potato Rolls” from the section on breads. I like that it uses a potato rather than dried potato flakes, and my mother had marked the recipe as “Delicious“.

I will make a half-recipe but other than that, I plan no changes to this recipe.

Potato Rolls
makes about 10

• 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water (105-115˚ F)
• 1 egg
• 2 1/2 tablespoons sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 1/2 tablespoons oil
• 3/4 cup riced cooked potato (boil or microwave a medium potato, then skin it and mash it well with a fork or masher or put it through a ricer if you have one)
• 1/4 cup dry milk
• 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 cups bread flour

Sprinkle the yeast into the warm water and let stand for 10 minutes, then stir until dissolved.

Put the yeast mixture and the egg, sugar, salt, oil, potato, and dry milk into an electric mixer and beat at low speed until well blended. Gradually add 1 cup of flour and beat well. Slowly add an additional 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups flour, first using the mixer, then by hand. Add enough flour so that the dough forms a ball away from the sides of the bowl. You do not need to knead this dough.

Put the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and let rise until double in size (less than an hour in a warm kitchen).

Press the dough out on a floured bread board until it’s about 1 1/2 inches thick. You can use a roller, but it’s hardly necessary. Cut with a 2 1/4-inch biscuit cutter, re-rolling the dough as necessary. Make about 9-10 rolls. Place the rolls in a buttered 8×8″ baking dish. Let rise again until they puff over the top of the baking dish; this will probably take a little more than a half hour if your kitchen is warm.

Bake at 375˚ for about 25 minutes.

Serve immediately with hot butter!

Comments

These turned out great!

You don’t need a potato ricer, I just used one for the fun of it. However, my ricer leaves a lot of un-riced potato stuck in the bottom, so to make the necessary 3/4 cup, I had to hand-mash what the ricer missed. Turns out, my dough looked a little lumpy. I suggest you mash the potato thoroughly with a fork, then mix it well during the blending step in the mixer.

Here is my lumpy, unrisen dough:

Risen dough:

I plopped the dough out onto a floured breadboard. Then I used a roller on the dough and wished I hadn’t. After brief rolling, the dough thickness was under 1 1/2 inches, and when I cut out a roll, it smushed down even further.

So, I ended up with about 12 rolls, and only 9 fit in the pan. I put the others in a separate pan.

Note that the above nine rolls are not quite touching. By the time they rose for about half an hour, they looked like this:

You can see the extra three malformed rolls in the other pan.

After baking, the rolls are golden brown and light and puffy:

I couldn’t resist. I just had to taste one. And they literally sang out butter! I put one on a plate and pulled it apart and put some butter on it. It took a lot of willpower to stop to take a photo before putting this roll in my mouth.

Soft and yummy and as good as the aroma promised. I’ll make these again.