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.

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