baking

Wine, cheese and walnut whole wheat bread using the Almost No-Knead method

maki — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:18:57 +0200

More than a year ago, a method of making bread that required no kneading at all was published in the New York Times, and swept through the food blogging world like wildfire. Here is that original recipe (login required). I tried it too, and while it did produce a very nice loaf, I found it rather lacking in character. So I adapted the method for making desem bread, a natural-yeast (no yeast added) bread that has a wonderful flavor.

However, desem is a very labor-intensive bread, even if the loaves themselves are made the no-knead way. The desem starter itself has to be nurtured and fed continuously. I haven’t managed to keep one alive for more than a few months at a time - when I get too busy, or go away or something, the desem dies and I have to start over. (I’ve tried freezing it and things and the results have been rather mixed.)

Late last year, Cook’s Illustrated came out with a recipe they called Almost No-Knead Bread. Some people have taken to calling it No-Knead 2.0, but the original is called Almost No-Knead. Here’s a link to the recipe that doesn’t require registration, though if they close that loophole you can register there for 14 days for free. I haven’t seen Almost No-Knead rage through the food blogging world with quite the enthusiasm that the original No-Knead did, but it is an interesting development. There is some minimal kneading involved, but nothing too taxing.

Here are the key differences between the No-Knead and the Almost No-Knead methods:

Beer (lager) and a little vinegar are added to Almost No-Knead, to add some character and flavor. (One of the main criticisms of Original No-Knead was that the bread was a bit bland.)
Almost No-Knead is less hydrated. No-Knead calls for 1 5/8 cups of water per 3 cups of flour, and Almost calls for 1 1/4 cups of liquid in the form of 3/4 cups + 2 tablespoons of water and 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons of lager. This allows for easier handling of the dough.
Almost No-Knead requires a little kneading and shaping of the loaf before the second rise.
An innovation added by Almost No-Knead is a sort of sling made of kitchen parchment paper, which is put under the loaf with the ends hanging out of the cast iron pot the loaf is baked in. This allows for the load to be taken out of that red hot pot easily.

I find that the No-Knead method produces a slightly better, more crackly crust, probably due to the higher hydration. But the taste of Almost No-Knead is indeed better, more tangy and complex, though not as deeply complex as a true sourdough. Both have that sort of silky, slightly doughy, open and moist texture that is much desired in ‘artisanal’ type breads.

Everyday Almost No-Knead

I’ve tried the original Almost No-Knead as well as the variations (I did buy a 1-year subscription to Cook’s Illustrated by the way, it is worth while) such as Seeded Rye and Pecan and Cranberries. The latter one is really good.

The schedule for making the bread that fits our daily life goes like this: I mix up the bread late in the evening, around 10 or 11. It requires an 18 hour rise, but it’s not too picky in that regard - an hour less or more doesn’t seem to affect things too much. The next day, around 5 or 6 whenever someone gets home if we are out, it’s punched down and kneaded (I like to add the additives at this stage rather than at the start) and given a 2 hour rise, then baked. We have the bread for dinner or for breakfast, or both. If you only have time to bake on weekends, do the bread mixing on Saturday to have fresh baked bread on Sunday, counting back at least 22 hours (1/2 hour for mixing/kneading, 18 for the first rise, 2 for the second rise, and 1 1/2 hours for cooling and such) from when you want to eat the bread.

Taking it even further

After I’d made the lager and vinegar flavored loaves several times, I started to wonder if adding wine would work. I used to love a bread called baguette au vin et rosette, pictured here, a crusty and hearty baguette with bits of rosette sausage and wine actually in the dough. The baker who made it unfortunately sold up and moved on, so I can’t get that bread anymore. After several tries, I think I have hit upon a combination that really works. So after a long preamble, here’s the recipe. Note that the hydration (amount of water) is a bit different from the original Almost No-Knead.

Recipe: Almost No-Knead whole wheat wine bread with walnuts and cheese

2 cups (10 oz / 280g) all-purpose flour
1 cup (5 oz / 140g) whole wheat flour
1/4 to 1/3 tsp. dry yeast
1 1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cups (177ml) lukewarm water
1/4 cup dry red wine
3/4 cups of roughly chopped walnuts
1/2 cup finely diced aged Gruyère, or other aged hard cheese

In a bowl, mix together the flours, yeast and salt. (Note about the yeast: I really don’t know what rapid-rise yeast is in German, and there’s only one kind of dry yeast sold here commonly, so I add just a tad more of that, and it works fine.) Add the liquids and mix until it forms a shaggy ball. It looks like this - the red wine does make it a light purple in color, but after it’s baked it’s much less noticeable (as you can see in the top photo).

Cover the ball and let it rise in a warm place for about 18 hours. (The most reliably warm place in our house is on top of an old PC tower case, turned on of course.)

After 18 hours or so are up, the dough should be risen and puffy. Knead in the walnuts and cheese, and form a ball again. Make a sort of sling out of parchment paper, but cutting a length of it off and folding it into half or thirds. Set this under the ball, in a pot or skillet, and cover the whole thing with a large bowl turned upside down over it, or plastic film. You may want to consult the step by step illustrations on the Cook’s Illustrated site for this part, or the video.)

Set your timer to 90 minutes, and when it beeps put an enamelled cast-iron pot in the oven and set it to 500°F / 260°C, or a bit less than that if you have a convection oven. (I do, and I set it to 250°C.) Set your timer to 30 minutes.

Take out the red-hot pot carefully, take the dough by the sling, and drop it in the pot. Bake for about 30 minutes, and take off the lid; if it looks too pale for you at this point, bake for an additional 10 minutes or so.

When done, take the bread out using the sling, and let cool on a rack. (My cooling rack is my grill!)

The wine really makes this bread taste interesting. A slice of this plus a salad or soup makes for a very satisfying lunch, and it also makes a great sandwich.

Variations

You can leave out the cheese for a walnut bread, or use pecans instead. Chopped up black olives are nice too, instead of the cheese. Or leave all out for a plain wine bread which goes well with just about anything, but especially - you guessed it - cheese.

One addition that has not worked for me so far is adding ham or sausage, a la the baguette au vin et rosette. Whatever ham or sausage I’ve tried has made the bread turn overly sausage-y. The experimentation on that front continues.

Homemade whole wheat pita bread, no oven needed

maki — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:56:47 +0100

Even with more than 900 (and counting) posts and almost 200 recipes posted on Just Hungry, there are still lots of things that I make all the time, but haven’t got around to writing about yet. A lot of those things take more time to write up than cook, almost. This whole wheat pita bread recipe is one of them. You do have to account for the obligatory rising time for the dough, but otherwise it’s dead easy, and your kitchen working time in total is maybe 20 minutes, 30 tops. For fresh baked bread!

The key is that the pitas are not baked in the oven. No need for preheating baking stones or quarry tiles or all that stuff. They are baked, so to speak, in a plain old frying pan. You can make them any size you want as long as it fits in the bottom of the frying pan. I like to make small, palm-sized ones for easy snacking or bringing along for lunch.

This recipe also only requires 3 cups of flour in total. I sometimes get a bit frustrated by bread recipes that call for like 6 cups of flour, since we are a small household watching our collective waistlines and there’s no way we can eat that much bread in a reasonable amount of time. Sure you can freeze the excess, but then you can quickly accumulate massive amounts of frozen bread if you bake often. So anyway, this makes 12 smallish pitas, which are gone quite quickly, especially with a resident Bread Fiend in house.

I referred to many other pita bread recipes, especially this excellent one on About.com, before arriving at this version. The cooking in the frying pan concept came from watching naan bread and Chinese flat breads puff when cooked on griddles. A griddle is not necessary though - and I think most people have at least one frying pan.

The recipe is so simple, and I make it so often, that I’ve committed it to memory.

Whole wheat pita bread without an oven

1 packet (7g) instant dried yeast
250ml warm water (A U.S. cup plus a bit)
pinch of sugar
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup white bread flour (or strong flour; in Switzerland use Zopfmehl (farine de tresse)) (Using bread flour ensures there’s sufficient gluten in the dough.)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp olive oil

Equipment needed:

a non-stick frying pan or two
lids to fit the pans
mixing bowl
clean washed pillow case

Mix together the warm water (from the tap is fine), yeast, and pinch of sugar. Leave in a warm place until frothy.

Mix together the flours and salt in a large mixing bowl. Add the liquid gradually, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon. Add the oil, and as soon as it’s formed a ball start to knead. (If it’s a bit dry, add water drops at a time until it’s kneadable). Knead until smooth and pliable.

Put the dough ball in a plastic bag or in a clean bowl covered with plastic wrap and leave in a warm place until more than doubled in bulk. In the winter, I find the ideal warm place is on top of a Big Ass PC case with gimpy motherboard which gives out excessive heat despite two cooling fans. This is one instance where I consider a PC to be superior for a task than a Mac.

After the dough has risen, punch it down and knead again. Cut into 8 to 12 equal pieces. Round off each piece into a smooth ball, and leave, covered with a damp cloth or plastic, to rest for about 10 minutes, on a floured surface. (This resting time I find is critical for the successful formation of the pocket inside the pita.)

Flatten the balls with your hand or a rolling pin to your desired diameter (for 12 pieces, about 5-6 inches / 12-15 cm is good). Let rest again for a few minutes so that the dough balls ‘relax’. [Edit: this was omitted before. It’s not critical, but if you’re having trouble getting a ‘pocket’ to form inside the pita, give this step a try.]

Heat up one or more non-stick frying pans, over medium-high heat.

Take a flattened ball and put in a hot frying pan. Cover with lid. Leave for about 2-3 minutes, until it puffs up. Flip over and cook for another 2-3 minutes on the other side. Some will puff more than others - don’t worry if the puffing is minimal, you can still use it.

Take out of the pan and immediately put into the pillow case. Close up the pillow case. This allows the pita to cool in a somewhat closed environment, so the surface is sort of pliable rather than crispy and brittle. (You can, of course, use a large kitchen towel instead, but I thought you might have fun pointing out to your friends that there’s a crazy woman who wants you to use a pillow case for baking bread. And it works!)

Repeat for the rest of the dough. Once you get used to it, you can heat up 2, 3 or more frying pans at once and cook several at a time. I find that juggling two pans is my limit though, or the pitas get too black. A little charring is fine - it just adds to the flavor.

Now let’s see if there’s a pocket inside by cutting one open.

There sure is!

(Sometimes there isn’t a pocket - the ones that didn’t puff much may be solid inside - but you can easily make one with a knife, or just by wiggling around two fingers inside the bread.)

These come out a bit puffier than commercial pita bread, but are delicious - better! - nevertheless. Use as you would any pita.

Leaf shaped black sesame cookies with matcha tea icing

maki — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:34:18 +0200

Flavor wise black sesame seeds aren’t that different, if at all, from white or brown sesame seeds. But there is something about their dramatic black-to-grey color that is quite exciting. At the moment I’m quite enamored with black sesame seeds, and have been using them instead of the regular brown ones in everything from sauces to salads.

These leaf shaped cookies contain toasted and ground black sesame seeds, dark brown muscovado sugar, and whole wheat flour, and are decorated with matcha (powdered tea) royal icing. The sweetness is quite restrained, both in the cookie and in the icing. You are first hit by the tea-flavored, very slightly bitter icing, followed by the nutty darkness of the cookie. It’s an intriguing combination. They are a wonderful accompaniment to tea, black or green, hot or iced. If the ultimate cookie to you means something very sweet and gooey you may not like these. They are quite adult cookies.

I had to shoot the pictures in a hurry, because they were disappearing faster than almost any other cookie I’ve made recently.

Since I don’t have a leaf shaped cookie cutter, I just made a simple paper template and cut the leaves out with a knife. You can cut them out into any shape you’d like of course, though given the coloring leaves seem appropriate. Quite spring-like, in fact.

Black sesame cookies with matcha icing

For the cookies:

50g / 1.75 oz. raw black sesame seeds
120g / 4.25 oz. dark brown muscovado sugar
250g / 8.8 oz. whole wheat or white cake flour (‘soft’ flour) or regular white all-purpose flour
100g / 3.5 oz. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 tsp. salt
1 large egg
A few dashes of almond extract

For the icing:

8 Tbs. powdered (icing) sugar
2 Tbs. matcha tea powder
1 Tbs. egg white or egg white substitute

Equipment needed:

kitchen parchment paper or baking paper
cookie cutter or sharp knife and a paper template
mortar and pestle or suribachi for grinding the sesame seeds
rolling pin

Toast the sesame seeds in a small frying pan until they just start to pop. Immeidiately remove from the pan.

In a mortar and pestle or suribachi, or with an electric grinder, grind up the sesame seeds until they have turned into a fragrant powder.

In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy. Add the ground up sesame and almond extract. Beat in the egg.

Add the flour a little at a time. The dough may not form a ball - it will be a bit on the dry side. Put into a plastic zip bag, and roll flat with a rolling pin. Put in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicon sheet.

Take the cookie dough out, and cut open the plastic bag with scissors. Cut out the cookies with cookie cutters or using a paper template and a sharp small knife. Place the cookies on the lined baking sheet.

Bake for about 25 minutes.

In the meantime, make the icing. Mix together the icing (powdered) sugar and the matcha powder. Add the egg white, mixing well to a spreadable but not too thin paste.

When the cookies are baked, take them out and cool, preferably on a cooling rack. Let cool completely.

Once the cookies are cooled, spread with the icing. Let dry on the cooling rack until the icing has firmed up.

Store the cookies (if any survive that long) in a cool, dry place.

Notes

Make absolutely sure that the sesame seeds are fresh, and not rancid. Taste and sniff - if it seems even the least bit off to you, it’s Not Good and has to be thrown out. The best way to store raw sesame seeds? Well wrapped, in the freezer.

If you can’t get a hold of whole wheat cake flour, use regular white cake flour or all-purpose flour. Regular whole wheat flour might make the cookies a bit dry.

Use the best quality matcha you can afford - keeping in mind that matcha is not cheap at all.

You can also use white icing - mix powdered sugar with a little lemon juice and egg white to form a paste. Or, leave the cookies unadorned - they look quite interesting that way too.

Banana coconut cake

maki — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:45:50 +0200

Some recipes come about from long experimentation and several tries to try to perfect them (like those darned bunnies, or my ongoing attempts to make natto at home). Others just seem to happen. We had a bunch of bananas that were rapidly turning very brown and spotty on the kitchen table. I froze some (nothing like frozen bananas as treats), and turned some into a cake.

It’s nothing fancy at all - it’s basically a pound-cake like base (but with a bit less sugar), with added cut-up bananas. The coconut part was added on a whim also. The cake doesn’t rise much, probably because of the bananas, but it’s moist, not too sweet, and very comforting. It’s perfect with a cup of tea.

So far in my life I’ve not had the opportunity to go to Hawaii (unless you count a short layover en route from LA to Tokyo) but I sort of imagine that this cake would not be too out of place there.

Banana coconut cake

Note that there are equal amounts in weight of eggs, butter, and flour. So, first weigh your cracked eggs, and then use the equal amounts of butter and flour. In my case the two large eggs I had came out to just about 120 grams.

2 large eggs (about 120g / 4 oz total weight)
120g / 4 oz unsalted butter
120g / 4 oz cake or all-purpose flour
100g / a bit less than 3 oz raw cane sugar or light brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
3 medium ripe bananas, cut up into smallish pieces
1 Tbs. brandy or 1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 Tbs. milk or soy milk
4 Tbs. dessicated coconut
extra butter for the pan

Equipment: 8 inch / 20cm square cake or brownie pan, electric or handheld whisk, kitchen parchment paper

Preheat the oven to 180 °C / 355° F.

Butter the cake or brownie pan and line with parchment paper, OR butter and flour the pan.

If the butter is still hard from the refrigerator, put it in a bowl and nuke it for a minute to soften.

Mix together the flour and baking powder.

Cream together the butter and sugar with the whisk until blended and fluffy. Add the eggs and whisk some more. Add the flavoring (brandy or vanilla) and milk.

Fold in the flour and baking powder, and fold in the bananas. Don’t overmix.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Sprinkle the top with the dessicted coconut.

Bake for about 40 minutes or until a skewer or chopstick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Notes

If the coconut looks too brown, put a piece of foil over the pan until the cake has finished baking through.

Out of love with silicon for baking

maki — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 17:56:27 +0100

Some years ago, when silicon baking wares came out, I jumped on them with glee. No more scraping off baked on crud from the baking sheets! Muffins that popped right up with no greasing of the cups required! Easy washing up!

But these days I’ve definitely fallen out of love with silicon sheets and silicon muffin pans and the like.

About those muffin pans first: while muffins do brown on the outsides, they don’t get as crispy-brown as I’d like. They also seem to rise a bit less than I’d like.

Also, they are totallly useless for popovers and Yorkshire puddings. You can’t really heat them up, so you can’t make them piping hot and pour in hot batter. The alternative method for making popovers ‘pop’ is to start them in a cold oven, but that doesn’t work either. So I end up with flat, boring muffins of a sort, rather than high and airy pockets of trapped air and eggy, moist insides. Yes, I know I could just get separate pans for the popover and Yorkshire puddings, but I don’t have that much storage space in my not-too-large kitchen, and I like to avoid ‘single-use’ type equipment as much as possible.

As for silicon baking sheets, used to line heavy baking sheets, they do okay on the browning front. But what I dislike about them is that, after a few uses they take on an unpleasantly ‘greasy’ feel to them. No amount of washing or soaking in soapy water seems to cure that. I don’t know if I’m over-sensitive to this, but it drives me nuts. So I end up throwing them out over maybe 3 uses. This doesn’t seem too economicalor environmentally friendly to me. (Do those things disintegrate at all in landfills?)

So, I’m back to good old metal baking tins and lining my baking sheets with kitchen parchment paper. My old metal muffin pans tend to stick a bit on the bottoms, so for delicate cupcakes and such I just use paper cupcake liners. (Which means of course I avoid those individual silicon cupcake cups.) Paper, at least, does disintegrate after a while.

How do you feel about those silicon baking products? Do you love them or hate them?

Pao de queijo, the very easy way

maki — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:10:49 +0100

Spiced chocolate cupcakes

maki — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 17:31:47 +0100

In the movie Chocolat, Juliette Binoche plays a somewhat mysterious woman who opens a chocolate shop in a small French village. She uses ancient Aztec spices in her chocolate confectioneries, which soon prove to have almost magical, often aphrodesiac, properties. While Chocolat is not in my top 5, or even 10, favorite food-theme movies (see here for that list), the idea of spiced chocolates has intrigued me ever since I saw it. One of my favorite chocolate bars is the Masala one made by Dolfin.

Making a spicy chocolate confection is a bit of a tricky affair though. You don’t want the spices to overwhelm the chocolate - it should just form a sort of interesting background, yet provide a bit of a surprising bite and a warm, ‘what is that?’ quality.

These cupcakes have a rich but not too sweet bisquit (cake) base, with the warmth of curry powder and the bite of coarsely ground pepper. They are moistened with a teaspoon per cupcake of mocca liqueur, which increases its intensity and pushes it into the realm of an adult indulgence. The chocolate ganache has a pinch of cayenne pepper in it. The marriage is quite successful (or so the Tasters emphatically agreed). I’m not sure if they work at aphrodesiacs, but if your sweetheart is a chocoholic, you never know… They make a terrific Valentine’s Day dessert or treat in any case.

Spiced chocolate cupcakes

Makes about 16 medium cupcakes

For the cake:

Spices and almonds:

40g / 1 1/2 oz. ground almonds (about 1/3 cup)
1/2 Tbs. coarsely ground black or mixed-color peppercorns
1 tsp. curry powder

Dry:

80g / about 3 oz superfine raw cane sugar (you can also whirl granulated sugar in a food processor until it’s finer)
120g / 4 1/4 oz. cake flour (about 2/3 cup)
2 Tbs. best quality cocoa powder
1/8 tsp. (a big pinch) baking powder

Moist:

200g / 7 oz. (two standard bars) dark chocolate with at least 70% cacao content
150g / 5 1/4 oz. (1 stick plus 1 1/2 Tbs.) unsalted butter, room temperature
4 eggs yolks from ‘large’ eggs
1 Tbs. instant coffee granules

Egg white:

4 egg whites from ‘large’ eggs
1 pinch salt

Booze:

about 1/2 cup mocca liqueur or rum

For the chocolate ganache:

200g / 7 oz (2 standard bars) dark chocolate with at least 70% cacao content
100g / 3 1/2 oz (1 stick less 1 Tbs.) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 pinch salt
1/8th tsp. cayenne pepper (add more at your discretion, but be careful)
1 Tbs. mocca liqueur or rum

Special equipment and supplies: a standing or handheld electric mixer, sifter, cupcake cups

Preheat the oven to 150°C / 300°F. Put the cupcake cups in muffin tins, or line up double or triple-layered cups on a baking sheet (of your cupcake cups don’t fit your muffin tins or you don’t have muffin tins).

Sift together the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder). If you end up with some sugar grains in the sifter, just dump them back in.

Put the ground almonds in a clean, dry small frying pan over medium-high heat. Toast, stirring constantly, until a light brown in color. Add the curry powder and the pepper and stir until the whole smells like toasty curry. Remove immediately from the pan and put into another container (or it will continue cooking and may burn).

Chop or bash the 2 chocolate bars into small pieces. Put the pieces into a microwave-safe bowl, and nuke at medium-low level for 3 minutes. Take out, stir and nuke for an additional 2 minutes. By this time the chocolate should be melted; if not, nuke for additional minute or so - don’t overdo it or your chocolate will turn grainy and icky. Stir well.

Add the butter in pieces to the warm chocolate and stir very well - it should be smooth and glossy. Add the coffee granules and the almond-spice mix. Keep warm.

In a clean, totally dry bowl, mix together the egg whites and pinch of salt. Whip until it forms soft peaks (an electric mixer is a very good thing to have for this task).

Add about 1/3rrd of the whipped egg white into the chocolate-butter mixture, to lighten it. Now, add the dry mixture by the tablespoon or two to the wet mixture, folding it in - don’t overmix or your cake will be a bit tough. Fold in the rest of the egg whites gently (if the batter is a bit streaky it’s fine).

Fill the cupcake cups about 2/3-rds full with the batter, using two spoons - it’s about 1 very heaped tablespoon per cup. (Use one spoon for scooping, and the other one for sliding the batter off the first spoon.)

Put in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes. The cake should rise a bit, and still look a bit moist.

While the cupcakes are still warm, drizzle each with a teaspoonful of mocca liqueur or rum. Let cool to room temperature.

In the meantime, make the ganache. Melt the chocolate as described before, and beat in the room temperature butter into the warm chocolate. Add the salt, cayenne pepper and liqeur, and beat very well. Put it in the refrigerator to firm up a bit.

When the cupcakes are cool, spoon on the ganache. Put the cupcakes in the refrigerater until the ganache is firm.

Notes

To make ahead, make the cupcakes, and spoon on the ganache about 1/2 hour before serving. Be sure to serve at room temperature or warmer (not cold straight out of the fridge).

Alternatively, add 1 to 2 tablespoons of heavy cream and/or liqueur to the ganache to make turn it into chocolate sauce.Pour the warm sauce over warm cupcakes (taken out of their cups, and nuked for 1 minute in a tucked in plastic bag in the microwave), and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

To make these kid-friendly, omit the liqueur.

No Knead Desem Bread

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:08:52 +0100

I’ve adapted the No Knead Bread method for making this bread as described here, for a bread that originally requires at least 20 minutes of kneading. It turns out a quite light, crispy-crust, delicious loaf.

1 3/4 cups of fully mature desem, containing 2 cups (120g) of flour
2 1/4 cups of unchlorinated (bottled or filtered) cold water
2 to 2 1/2 tsp. salt
4 cups (480g) fresh, organic whole wheat flour (the same flour with which you made the desem starter)

In a large bowl, preferably glass or ceramic, cut the desem into little pieces, and mix in with the water and salt. Stir around, squishing the little bits of dough, until the desem completely melts into the water, making a uniform liquid. Since you won’t be kneading the bread for a long time as with the original recipe, this step is critical to ensure the desem is distributed throughout the liquid.

Add the flour, 1 cup at a time, stirring after each addition. At the end you should end up with a soggy, saggy, but not totally liquid mass. It should form a rather wet and soggy ball in the bowl.

Cover the bowl with plastic film, leaving a small gap so that air can get in. Leave the bowl at room temperature for about 8 hours (a shorter time than is required for the original recipe), or until the dough has nearly tripled in size. If you have a good mature desem to start with, this will happen reliably. Punch the dough down and leave it to re-rise for another 1-2 hours.

Make ready a clean, non-terry kitchen towel by sprinkling it rather thickly with whole wheat flour.

Take the dough out and sort of knead/round it out - it will be very sticky, but you want a sort of cohesive ball, as detailed in the original No Knead Bread recipe. Put the ball on the floured towel and cover. Let it rise for about 90 minutes.

In the meantime, heat up the oven and your heavy enamelled cast iron pot with the plastic knob removed (lest you melt it off) in a 450°F / 225°C oven for at least 30 minutes before the baking time. (I use a Le Creuset Doufeu, whose lid had no knob to start with.)

Take the heated pot carefully out of the oven, remove the lid and place on a secure heat-proof surface. Take the towel containing the dough by both ends and carefully flop the dough into the pan. Immediately put the lid back on and the pot into the oven.

Bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid, lower the heat to 350°F / 175°C (this differs from the original recipe) and bake for an additional 30 minutes.

Take the loaf out of the pan and let cool before cutting, if you can resist.

Note: the crust turns out a bit thicker than the white flour No Knead, but is still thin and crisp enough. The lowering the heat and baking for a longer time is necessary to bake this heavier whole grain bread all the way through.

I still haven’t figure out how to prevent a large rip from appearing on the upper crust. Though I must say that the ripped part has a really nice, crispy/chewy texture.

Adapting the No Knead method for desem bread

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:01:15 +0100

Like probably everyone, or at least every food blogger, in the world with an oven and a fondness for baking bread, I tried the No Knead Bread as written up in the New York Times in November. Authored by Mark Bittman via Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York, this almost perplexingly easy method of mixing up a bread dough that has that distinctive 'artisanal bread' crumb and thin, crackly crust caused a sensation in the teapot that is the world of food blogging.

As just about everyone says, it does produce a very good bread. And yet...for me it lacked that something extra special. This has a lot to do with the fact that in this country good bread is quite easy to get. Even the bread sold at the major supermarkets is not bad at all. The rather shiny, slightly gummy, open-grained texture of the No Knead Bread reminded me of pain paillase, a very popular twisted loaf bread that's widely sold in Swiss bakeries. The thing is though, pain paillase, being a pain au levain (a sort of sourdough) and baked into a fat baguette shape, is tastier than the all-white flour No Knead Bread. So, I haven't baked any basic No Knead since the first couple of loaves. Besides. I'm trying to cut out white flour at the moment.

The technique itself is so easy that my thoughts turned to adapting it to my favorite homebaked bread, desem. Desem bread is the first long-term project that I wrote up in a series of articles on this site 3 years ago. It's still the most interesting all-whole wheat bread that I've eaten, being so much lighter than most all-whole wheat breads, yet chewy, complex and substantial. The one drawback to desem bread is that the original recipe as calls for it to be kneaded for a very, very long time, with lots of muscle. In The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book where the recipe with long, extremely detailed instructions appeared, they call for kneading it for 20 minutes. I don't now about you, but I don't really have the time or patience to be kneading bread for 20 minutes once or more a week, even if desem bread is so good that I crave it when I don't have a loaf around.

So, since December when I stopped making white-flour No Knead, I've been experimenting with no-knead desem. It wasn't as easy as I thought: the first time the bread flopped miserably in the ultra-heated Le Creuset pan and never recovered; the second time the bread was so wet that half of it remained stuck in gooey mess on the towel; and so on. But the last few times it's worked quite well. The bread rises very nicely, the crumb is light and open yet has that 'artisanal kneaded for hours' texture, and the crust is crisp and crackly. And, that slightly sour, distinctive desem flavor is still there.

You do need to start out with a fully mature desem - an immature desem won't have the leavening power. Please follow the desem steps from day 0 if you've never given this a try. It will be worth it provided you can give it all of the right conditions.

» No Knead Bread Recipe

Sliced desem bread, showing the crumb

maki — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 17:15:33 +0100