No-Knead Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread

Remember Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's lovely chocolate currant bread in How to Make Bread? Maybe because of the cold snap that hit most of the country, including our state, and maybe because there are few things more comforting than the aroma and taste of chocolate when the outside world freezes up, I had a sudden craving for that bread when we came back from our Thanksgiving family visits. However I knew there was no way I could make it until I got my levain (starter) going again and since said levain had been quartered in the fridge for a couple of weeks, I also knew it was going to require some tender loving care over the course of a few days before it got back to its usual ebullient and efficient self...
Meanwhile, what could I do? Mix a poolish, let it ferment overnight and use that instead of levain? Sure, and I would have done just that if, on the plane ride home, I hadn't read the Kindle version of Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François' appealing new book, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and bookmarked a double chocolate bread which seemed rather similar to Hadjiandreou's (minus the currants) but required neither levain nor poolish. It did require a long cold fermentation though. Impatience and curiosity had a go at each other within my head for a few seconds and curiosity won. I decided to give the Artisan-in-Five recipe a try.
The result is spectacularly tasty, even if a bit less complex than the levain version. The crumb is both soft and ever so slightly crunchy and the dark chocolate flavor is to die for. I attribute the almost imperceptible crunch to the sugar I used: with the drop in temperature, the hummingbirds had been feeding like crazy and most of our regular sugar had gone into making nectar for them. I didn't feel like driving to the store just for sugar, so I settled for evaporated cane juice sugar which we had in stock. It doesn't seem to melt in quite the same way but I actually love the crunch.
Despite the fact that I only used half the amount of sugar indicated in the original recipe, the bread eats like chocolate cake (with less fat) and is so easy to make that even a beginner should have good results.
One thing to keep in mind if you decide to try your hand at it though: do not treat time indications as gospel truths. I am sure that all the recipes in the book have been thoroughly tested and re-tested but they haven't been tested in my kitchen in the winter, using the flour available to me. If I had followed the recipe to a tee, I doubt I would be as satisfied as I am with the result. So instead of going by the book, trust your eyes and hands. To give you an example, the dough sat on the counter for close to twenty-four hours after mixing before it had risen enough to be put in the fridge (instead of the two hours indicated in the recipe) and, on Baking Day, the shaped loaves proofed for two hours (instead of forty minutes) before they were ready to bake. Depending on where you live and a myriad of other factors, you may have a different experience. If you have the patience to jot down flour brand, dates, times and temperatures and if you make the recipe over and over (which you may well do if you get hooked), you will learn more about the interplay of these factors. In the words of Adam Gopnik (in Bread and Women, a piece he wrote recently for The New Yorker and which, sadly, isn't available online in its full-text version), "Bread dough isn't like dinner food, which usually rests inert under the knife and waits for you to do something to it: bread dough sits there, respiring and rising, thinking things over." In my experience, the more a baker knows about the way dough thinks, the easier it becomes for her to humor it and get good results.
Jeff and Zoë kindly gave me permission to blog the recipe providing I used my own words. Please note that I adapted both the ingredients (using less sugar and a different salt) and the method. For the original recipe, I refer you to the book and, for more info regarding the "Artisan in Five" method, to the Breadin5 website and corresponding YouTube videos, including this one.

Ingredients: (for three 300g-loaves)

(The formulas were created using BreadStorm)

By weights

By percentages

Method:

(The dough is made a few days ahead of the actual baking day)

1. On Day 1, I mixed the liquid ingredients in a large bowl (using water at 100°F), then added yeast and sugar 
2. I added in the remaining dry ingredients (flour, salt and cocoa) and mixed well, using a dough whisk.  Even though the whisk helped a lot, at the end I had to use my hands and since my wrist is not strong enough yet to hold the bowl firmly for long, the cocoa powder wasn't perfectly blended in, which really doesn't matter. A case can actually be made for the white swirls, don't you think? Next time, I might just stop blending in the cocoa a bit sooner...
3. I covered the bowl loosely (the dough needs some oxygen at this stage) and let rest at room temperature (which was 65°F on that day). According to the book, the dough will rise and collapse within about two hours but I suppose it depends on the season and how warm your house is. In my case, after two hours it was going nowhere fast. In fact, it took almost 24 hours to rise
4. Once it had more than doubled and looked like it could do no more, I put it in the fridge, tightly covered this time
5. The authors suggest using the dough within a five-day period: accordingly I used two-thirds of  it on Day 3 and will use the rest by Day 5. Following their instructions, I dusted the surface of the dough with flour. Then I scooped out 600 g of dough which I divided in two. I loosely shaped two boules which I let rest at room temperature on a floured countertop, covered with a plastic sheet
6. After thirty minutes I shaped one piece of dough as a bâtard and the other one as a boule and I sent them to rise on a board covered with flour-dusted parchment paper. I placed the board inside a large sealed plastic bag, put a space heater in the little laundry room (which doubles as my bakery) so that the room temp rose to about 73°F and I waited. The loaves took over two hours to proof (rise). (You know they are ready to bake when they jiggle as you gently shake the board.) At a lower room temperature, the process might have been even longer
7. Meanwhile I had preheated the oven (equipped with a baking stone) at 350°F. Before sliding the loaves onto the baking stone, I brushed them with a bit of melted butter and sprinkled them with pearl sugar
8. I baked the loaves for 50 minutes (a good way to know when they are baked through is to take them out, hold them upside down and knock on the bottom with your knuckles. If they give a hollow sound, they are done. If not, bake a while longer)
9. I let them cool overnight on a rack before slicing one of them open.

For those of you who are using BreadStorm (including the free version), please click on this link to import the formula so that you can scale it up or down as desired.

Back home...for now!

Back home after a long visit overseas and itching to finally get back to baking after a 6-month hiatus, I took out the levain nuggets I had made in the fall to jumpstart the rebirth of my starter. (To make these nuggets, I cut up my 60% hydration starter in small pieces, let them air dry until completely dessicated and then store them in an airtight container). The whole process is normally a no-brainer: I cover two or three nuggets with water, let them sit for a while, add flour, mix and let rest, feed again, etc., until the thing come back to life. It usually takes between 36 and 48 hours.

Well, this time, it didn't go as planned. The first batch of nuggets (luckily I had made three) had become infested with tiny black insects. All the bugs were dead (I guess levain bacteria are not what these beasties are supposed to snack on) but the nuggets were history.

As to the second batch, it didn't even have a chance to show its mettle. Since the house was pretty cold (I know, everybody is sweltering across America but I assure you, in the Northwest, we have natural air-conditioning and my house is nowhere close to overheating). So anyway it was barely 60°F in the kitchen and since I am now the proud owner of a warming drawer (something I had never seen or used before), I figured I would set the warmer at the lowest temperature and put the levain inside. I guess I should have read the manual before I entrusted my baby to this thing as it does get awfully hot, much more than I thought! To make a long story short when I checked on the levain an hour later, it was resting placidly where I had left it and when I opened the lid, it exhaled a doughy sigh that bore no trace of the wild aromas I am so crazy about!

Out came the last surviving nuggets. Needless to say, I was extremely careful with them. I treated them to a steady diet of high-extraction wheat flour and freshly milled rye and after 24 hours of what I assume was deep reflection on their part, they finally came back to life. When they woke up, they showed such vigor that within 48 hours, I was able able to bake, which was good since we have family coming to visit next week and I needed to replenish the freezer...

While all this was going on I was so frustrated that I decided to go back to an old workhorse, Jim Lahey's no-knead bread of New York Times and Internet fame, and give it another try, except that this time I used the same proportion of whole grain (a mixture of wheat, spelt and rye) as in my staple dough (the one I use for the rustic batard). This dough has a depth-of-flavor which we have grown addicted to and I wanted to see for myself how much was due to the freshly milled grains and how much to the levain.

Well, now I know. The yeast-based miche (made with a dough that had fermented 24 hours after the initial mix) turned out just fine but the aromas were muted, barely perceptible. Nothing like the fragrant music we have grown accustomed to. I am not bashing yeasted dough: I love tasty baguettes and other prefermented breads way too much for that. I am just saying that this 24-hour bread came in very handy (it made great breakfast toasts) but that it wasn't the same, which means that I will happily remain on levain duty for the foreseeable future.

Goat Cheese Foccacia with Cherries and Shallots

I felt I had posted enough flatbreads this summer already, so I wasn't going to post the recipe for this foccacia for fear you guys would think I've gone no-knead and flatbreadish all the way! But it is simply too delicious to be kept a secret. I have to share. No way around that... As explained in A Convenient Dough, the original recipe can be found in Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois (a book to which I came reluctantly but which I found to be a good source of ideas and inspiration). Although it was love at first bite, I now make it with fresh goat cheese and I think it tastes even better. Try it and let me know!

If you have the dough ready (I use no-knead naturally leavened whole grain pizza dough which I keep in the fridge but you can buy ready-made whole wheat pizza dough) , it'll take you 5 minutes to chop two shallots and set them to marinate together with a fistful of dried cherries (not the sour kind) in a bit of red wine diluted with water and seasoned with salt and black pepper , another 2 or 3 to scoop out a grapefruit-size chunk of dough and flatten it as thin as possible on a parchment-paper covered sheet pan or pizza pan.

Everything gets to rest for 30 minutes (including you) while the oven heats up to 450ºF/232ºC. Then you drain the cherries and shallots (blotting them out with a paper towel if necessary), spread them on the waiting dough (pressing down the cherries), crumble fresh creamy goat cheese over the cherries and shallots, add some more salt and pepper and slide the foccacia into the oven. Twenty minutes later (during which your kitchen fills up with a complex and delicate fragrance), I guarantee you will be in tastebuds' heaven!

Tips:

• Don't overdo the cherries, especially if they are really sweet (I use Stoneridge Orchards organic whole dried Montgomery cherries and find that the foccacia comes out better with more shallots than cherries)
• If desired, paint with (just a drop of) extra virgin olive oil after baking.

This foccacia goes to Susan's Wild Yeast for Yeastspotting.

100% whole-grain pizza ("au levain")

The last thing I thought I would end up doing this summer is to go back to no-knead doughs. I had been there, done that, not been convinced that it was really for me and moved on. But here we are in our little camp by the river with a flock of kids and grandkids and, despite the long list of breads I'd like to try making, I have actually much less time than anticipated for mixing, folding, proofing and experimenting.

So I am mostly sticking to the rustic batard recipe, making a batch every other day to cover our basic needs and I find myself going no-knead for pretty much everything else. What can be more convenient than mixing all the ingredients briefly in a bowl, setting the dough to rise at room temperature until it rises, sticking it in the fridge for a few days and taking out what you need when you need it (no pun intended)? Moreover this dough doesn't need to proof (I just keep the pizza on the counter until the oven reaches the desired temperature) or be rolled out.

My grandkids, even the pickiest among them, love whole-grain pizza (they don't actually know or care whether or not their pizza is made with whole grain or with bleached white flour, they just love the taste), so I tried to come up with a 100% whole grain no-knead recipe that would use levain (of which I always have an ample supply) and no commercial yeast (to avoid the risk of phytic acid blocking the absorption of nutrients) (see the last three or four paragraphs of A Convenient Dough).

I started by using too much levain and found the dough too acidic (although none of the kids commented on it and they all ate their pizza with the same gusto), so I reduced the proportion and now use 150 g firm levain for 950 g of flour. You may find you need to use a slightly bit more or a slightly bit less, depending on your levain and your taste.

I have an electric mill, so I mill my own whole grain flour, using wheat, spelt and rye berries. I mill it fine enough that I don't have to sift it. If you don't have access to a mill, you can use a mix of whole wheat, whole spelt and whole rye flours (dark rye flour) in the same proportions.

Ingredients (for a batch of dough that yields at least 4 large pizzas)

150 g firm levain (hydration rate: 60%)

950 g whole grain flour (45% wheat, 45% spelt and 10% rye)

50 g gluten

787 g water

18 g salt

100 g extra-virgin olive oil (optional)

Method (adapted from Healthy Breads in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois)

1. Whisk together the flour, yeast, salt and gluten in a 5-quart bowl
2. Add the liquid ingredients and mix without kneading using a spoon. You might need to use wet hands to get the last bit of flour to incorporate
3. Cover (not airtight) and allow the dough to rest at room temperature until it rises and collapses (or flattens on top), approximately 2 hours
4. Refrigerate it in a lidded container and use it over the next 7 days
5. On baking day, preheat the oven to 400 F/204 C with a baking stone in it
6. Take the dough out of the fridge, dust its surface with flour and scoop out a 450g (grapefruit size) piece. Dust the piece with more flour, knead it for a few seconds (to make it more cohesive) and quickly shape it into a ball
7. Slightly oil a pizza pan (preferably with olive oil) or a baking sheet
8. Using your hands, flatten the ball of dough onto the pan, making sure it is about the same thickness all around
9. Add the desired toppings and bake for 20 to 25 minutes minutes or so (putting the pizza pan directly on the baking stone, checking after 15 minutes and turning the pizza around if necessary)
10. Allow to cool on a rack.

We were sharing the pizza with our 5-year old grand-daughter who doesn't tolerate anything but sauce and cheese on her pizza. So I painted the whole pizza with pizza sauce (store-bought) and went about 50-50 with the toppings. On our side, I used raw portobello mushrooms, thinly sliced, and fresh sweet red peppers topped with Parmesan shavings and smoked Spanish paprika. On hers, just store-bought shredded mozzarella. She ended up eating most of her half (she kindly allowed her grandfather to have the last small slice).

This pizza goes to Susan's Wild Yeast blog for Yeastpotting.

A Convenient Dough (no-knead, 100% whole wheat)

When Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois came out last fall, it didn't even make a bleep on my radar screen. I didn't read any review or go to a bookstore to browse through it or check it out of the library. Everyone was coming out with a no-knead bread book and I just didn't have the energy to deal with one more.

Then Joanne from Eats Well With Others mentioned in one of her posts a lovely whole-wheat black-pepper dried cherries foccacia from the book and when I asked her about the recipe, she was kind enough to send it to me.

It so happens that almost at the same time, I received the book as a present. We were about to leave for our little camp by the river and I took it with me.

As I had local maple syrup at hand, the first recipe I tried making from the book was a 100% whole grain maple oatmeal bread. Neither of us liked it (a very rare occurrence when bread is concerned) and I felt even less motivated to read on. Then we had friends from France visiting for a week and I decided I would make the black-pepper cherry foccacia for "apéritif" (happy hour) during their stay.

So I mixed the dough (with a minimum amount of yeast) and let it ferment in the fridge for about 5 days. It looked supremely soupy and I had serious doubts about anything good coming out of it.

However the foccacia (which calls for soaking dried cherries, black pepper and shallots in red wine for 30 minutes) turned out to be particularly delicious. The topping is to die for and the dough was surprisingly light with a beautiful cherry wood color. Maybe because I was under the spell of the margaritas our friend had just mixed and poured, I totally forgot to take pictures but trust me! it was one stunning whole wheat foccacia.

I can't tell you about other recipes in the book as I haven't really tried any yet (although several look interesting). I was so surprised by the way the 100% whole wheat dough came out, by the fact that my family, including picky grandkids, was gobbling up the resulting pizzas and foccacias as if they were freshly baked baguettes and by how convenient it was to have them on the table in minutes that I have kept a batch of fermenting 100% whole wheat dough in the refrigerator ever since (it can be kept for as long as 7 days).Variations are endless, depending on what you have available. I thus made:

A fresh fennel-Vidalia onion foccacia with black olives and fennel seeds

A prune-hazelnut foccacia (the pitless prunes I had were a tad too dry so I soaked them in red wine for 24 hours. I toasted and peeled the hazelnuts. A few were caramelized and ground).

A potato-roasted red pepper pizza with onion, black olives, Italian sausage, basil and za'atar

A dry berries-crystallized ginger foccacia topped with poppy and pumpkin seeds (which I didn't remember to photograph after baking)

And just yesterday for the kids' breakfast a dark chocolate-marshmallow pizza that even the little ones loved

Here is the recipe for the dough.

100% Whole Wheat Dough with Olive Oil from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day

(makes enough dough for at least four 450g-foccacias or pizzas)

Ingredients:

910 g whole wheat flour (I used flour from Moulin de la Rémy)

5 g instant yeast

15 g sel

35 g vital wheat gluten

788 g lukewarm water

105 g olive oil

Method: (my version)

1. Whisk together the flour, yeast, salt and gluten in a 5-quart bowl
2. Add the liquid ingredients and mix without kneading using a spoon. You might need to use wet hands to get the last bit of flour to incorporate
3. Cover (not airtight) and allow the dough to rest at room temperature until it rises and collapses (or flattens on top), approximately 2 hours
4. Refrigerate it in a lidded container and use it over the next 7 days
5. On baking day, dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and scoop out a 450g (grapefruit size) piece (despite the olive oil, these foccacias do not have a long shelf-life, so it's best to make them just the size you need) . Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball
6. Elongate the ball into a narrow oval (for a foccacia) or flatten it into a circle (for a pizza) and allow it to rest for 30 minutes on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and dusted with semolina flour (I don't cover the dough at this stage as it is extremely wet)
7. Preheat the oven to 400 F/204 C
8. Add the desired toppings to the dough and bake for 30 minutes or so (checking after 15 minutes and turning the bread around if necessary) (because the dough is so wet, I use no steam but the authors do, so maybe their dough is a bit drier)
9. Allow to cool on a rack

Now for the healthy claim. Honestly I don't know. This dough calls for added gluten, so it is obviously not for people suffering from celiac disease or other forms of gluten intolerance. I wouldn't want to try it without this gluten boost however as it would probably turn out like shoe leather.

But beyond that, how nutritious are whole grains when fermented with commercial yeast? From what I understand from a long exchange on the Bread Bakers' Guild of America's forum and other sources, notably Hubert Chiron's Les pains français (a major reference for French master bakers) or Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters, a long levain fermentation generates phytase, an enzyme which prevents the phytic acid naturally present in whole grains to block the absorption of calcium, magnesium and other nutrients by our bodies. Fermentation of whole grains with commercial yeast doesn't generate phytase and could conceivably lead to nutritional deficiencies if our bodies do not absorb these nutrients from other foods.

But is it the long duration of the levain process which enables the production of phytase or is it the nature of the micro-organisms involved? In other words, does a long fermentation with a minimal amount of commercial yeast (a condition the above dough undoubtedly satisfies) present the same benefit as a long fermentation with wild yeast?

Since I am neither a scientist nor a nutritionist, I don't know. So I decided not to take a chance, especially since I am feeding a flock of grandchildren who need all the calcium they can get. I mean, what's the point of feeding them yogurt, cheese, beans and greens if the bread they eat interferes with nutrient absorption? So, with them in mind, I developed this no-knead 100% whole grain pizza dough recipe which uses levain and no commercial yeast.

These flatbreads are going to Susan's Wild Yeast blog for Yeastpotting.

Jim Lahey's No-Knead Peanut Bread

I am not a huge fan of commercial yeast. First of all, I don't particularly care for the flavor, then I often find the crust way too thin for my taste (although I love deliciously crisp and tasty poolish-based baguettes such as the one I once tasted in North Carolina at Lionel Vatinet's La Farm Bakery) and finally I am convinced that levain breads are nutritionally more wholesome (see Professor Robert Low's article on the health benefits of levain). So, coming to the Bay Area for a 3-week stay (which somehow morphed into 4-week one), I brought with me a dry nugget of my levain à la Gérard, which I diluted it in lukewarm water upon arrival and mixed the day after with some wheat, spelt and rye flours. After playing dead for 24 hours, it came back to life with a vengeance and I was able to bake with it only 24 hours after its resurrection. However, since I didn't have access to a mill, I had to used store-bought whole grain flours and the taste was just not the same. Let's put it that way: knowing and loving what this levain can do, it was hard to settle for less. So after a while, I told myself "Oh, well! Forget about it, at least I tried. There are so many good bakeries in the Bay Area that I'll just go and buy bread every day. Let me dump the levain (gasp!) and save myself the chore of feeding it twice a day." And so I did... But I failed to take into account the fact that the urge to bake has an irresistible grip on me. I just love making bread, I have it in my blood, I can't stop doing it. So, suddenly bereft of levain (a novel kind of experience for me since, back home, I am always swimming in a surplus of the wild beasties), I cast around for alternatives and stumbled upon Jim Lahey's My Bread - The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method. I decided to give it a try. The book is esthetically very pleasing. The photography, by Squire Fox, is gorgeous and the recipes are very clearly presented. So far I have only tried two of them, the Olive Bread and the Peanut Bread. Both were completely hassle-free. I would say these are the easiest breads I ever made, much simpler actually than the ones to be found in Kneadlessly Simple. The proportions given for water and flour work beautifully. The dough comes together like a charm and after one single fold, it looks strong enough to shape.

No-Knead Olive Bread

I didn't particularly care for the above Olive Bread. The recipe calls for 3 g of instant yeast for 400 g of flour and somehow the flavor and smell of yeast came out too strongly for my taste. I forgot to shoot the crumb and the bread disappeared so fast (I guess my kids liked it better than I did) that by the time I remembered to take a picture, it was too late. There was nothing special about it anyway.

No-Knead Peanut Bread

Now the No-Knead Peanut Bread is good (it uses 1 g of yeast for 300 g of flour). Its greatest advantage (and I suspect that it is the case with most of the recipes in the book) is that it is truly no-hassle, provided one is willing to wait 24-hours between the mixing and the eating. If one doesn't have an overwhelming preference for levain breads or other breads made with a preferment (aroma-wise, I don't think the 18-hour slow fermentation of the whole dough offers a valid substitute, at least in this case) or if there is no good bakery in the vicinity (as often happens in vacation areas), then it is a quite handy recipe to have in one's repertoire. It tastes specially good when toasted. Lahey also offers a slightly different peanut butter and jelly version which must be specially popular with the younger set. I'll have to try it on my grandchildren back home. Ingredients (for 1 loaf): 280 g unbleached all-purpose flour (Lahey specifies "bread flour" but in my experience what bakers often mean by "bread flour" is actually regular all-purpose and, unless there are indications to the contrary, AP flour is always what I use) 20 g whole-wheat flour 4 g table salt 1g instant yeast 260 g water (@ 55 to 65 degrees F/13 to 18 degrees C) 50 g unsalted smooth peanut butter 35 g unsalted dry-roasted peanuts, whole 35 g unsalted dry-roasted peanuts, roughly chopped Method: Please note that his bread is made over a 2-day period.

1. In a medium bowl, stir together the flours, salt, and yeast. In a blender, blend the water and peanut butter (some settling will occur if this is left to stand, so blend just before using).
2. Add to the flour mixture and, using a wooden spoon or your hand (I actually used a dough hook, a tool which I find most useful for mixing no-knead doughs)...
   
   ...mix until you have a wet, sticky dough without any lumps, about 30 seconds
3. Stir in the whole peanuts until evenly distributed
4. Cover the bowl and let sit at room temperature until the surface is dotted with bubbles and the dough is more than doubled in size, 12 to 18 hours
5. When the first rise is complete (in my case the dough fermented for 24 hours because of a scheduling conflict but it still looked perfectly fine when I took it out of the bowl), generously dust a work surface with flour. Use a bowl scraper or rubber spatula to scrape the dough out of the bowl in one piece
6. Using lightly floured (or wet) hands or a bowl scraper, lift the edges of the dough in towards the center. Nudge and tuck in the edges to make it round
7. Place a tea towel on your work surface. Generously dust with wheat bran or flour. Gently place the dough on the towel, seamside down. Sprinkle the surface of the dough with a light dusting of flour.
8. Fold the ends of the teatowel loosely over the dough to cover it and place it in a warm, draft-free spot to rise for 1 to 2 hours. The dough is ready when it is almost doubled. If you gently poke it with your finger, it should hold the impression. If it springs back, let it rise for another 15 minutes
9. Half an hour before the end of the second rise, preheat the oven to 475 degrees F/246 C, with a rack in the lower third, and place a covered 4 1/2 to 5 1/2-quart heavy pot in the center of the rack
10. Using pot holders, carefully remove the preheated pot from the oven and uncover it. Sprinkle half the chopped peanuts into the pot. Unfold the tea towel and quickly but gently invert the dough into the pot, seam side up. (Use caution - the pot will be very hot). Sprinkle the remaining chopped peanuts on top of the dough. Cover the pot and bake for 45 minutes
11. Remove the lid and continue baking until the bread is medium chestnut color, about 10 minutes. Use a heatproof spatula or pot holders to carefully lift the bread out of the pot and place it on a rack to cool thoroughly.

Lahey offers several other appealing recipes, some of which - such as the stirato, a kind of Italian baguette - are not baked in a pot but rather on a baking stone. New Yorkers might want to try the Jones Beach Bread (made with seawater as in prehistoric times). The Carrot Bread -made with freshly squeezed carrot juice, currants and walnuts - looks really good. So does the Apple Bread which uses fresh apples, dried apple slices and freshly squeezed apple juice. I wouldn't mind trying the Fennel-Raisin Bread which requires caramelized fennel bulbs and Pernod or other anise-flavored liqueur. I probably would like these breads better if they were leavened differently but in a pinch, I would certainly give any of these a shot, especially when they contain flavorful ingredients which might somehow distract from the less complex taste. It can be (and has been) argued that such books as Lahey's dumb down the bread-baking process so that anyone can believe himself or herself a baker and that there is more to making good bread than mixing flour, water, salt and a pinch of yeast and letting the resulting dough sit 18 hours at room temperature before sticking it in the oven. Maybe so. I still like the idea that many more people might get hooked into baking by such a book or others like it. Not every home baker needs to be a "serious home baker". More bakers mean more debate and more ideas. It may also mean more people caring about what goes into their bread and, consequently, a wider selection of flours and grains. More bakers might mean that one day, my local East Coast Costco will finally carry organic all-purpose flour instead of the awful bleached flour it now stocks. And on that day, I will give thanks to whom thanks are due, namely the bakers -well-known or anonymous - who work tirelessly to promote the cause of bread. Like it or not, Jim Lahey is one of them... Jim Lahey's No-Knead Peanut Bread goes to Susan, from Wild Yeast, for Yeastpotting.

No-Knead Bread

Be sure to check out Better Bread with Less Kneading, a very interesting article by Harold McGee in today's New York Times.

No-knead bread strikes again!

(click on the image to see the book on amazon.com)

Just as we thought we now knew more than we ever would need or want to know about no-knead bread and painless artisan bread, here comes a new book with a new method and plenty of well-researched recipes and, listen to this, it rocks!
Serious amateur bakers who love to mix their dough just on this side of enough, make sure it comes out at the right temperature (usually somewhere around 75 F/24 C), like to give it some strength (but not too much) by folding it once or twice while it is rising, treat it like bone china and are rewarded by crusty crusts and holey crumb will be horrified to learn that pouring ice water onto the flour and mixing it until just incorporated, adding flour so that the dough becomes very stiff, then sticking it in the fridge for up to 10 hours, then letting it rise at cool room temperature for 18 to 24 hours, then adding yet more flour not only works, but works great!
It is easy to see that the author spent years baking the traditional way before going on to experiment with this method. She is clearly on solid grounds when talking about bread "science".
Her goal is to make it possible for everybody to bake good bread at home using a simplified Reinhard/Gosselin method (for more info on this method, please refer to The Breadbaker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhard).
Bagget minimizes the number of steps and opportunities for mistakes and explains how to adapt traditional recipes to her method. Generally speaking, she goes a long way towards simplifying artisan baking at home.
Her book contains many different recipes, covering a wide variety of grains and other ingredients.
I can't vouch for her baking method which I didn't follow as I don't like the idea of doing the second rise directly in an ovenproof pot or casserole. I like to use baskets or to just shape the loaves on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper and then, transfer them to a Dutch oven just before baking. Also, the San Francisco style sourdough bread recipe is the only one in the book that uses sourdough. Since I prefer baking with natural starter to baking with commercial yeast (I like the crust better and the shelf life is much longer), I converted to sourdough most of the recipes I tried. They still work, which says a lot for the soundness of the method, however out of the beaten paths it may sound.
It was fun to try the recipes and find out time after time that the bread came out just as I wanted it. The only part I take exception with is that the process is rather long. This is not a spur-of-the-moment let's make bread for dinner tonight kind of book. The actual worktime is quite short but you need to plan ahead a little bit. On the other hand, if it were at all quicker, this no-knead method would probably produce mediocre breads, so it is a trade-off.
I like the fact that, in most cases, there is only one bowl, sometimes two, to clean but I regret that the ingredients are mostly measured in volume (although ounces are indicated for the flours). I hope that in another edition (or a follow-up book), grams will be given as well.
For people who watch their sugar intake, some of the breads may contain too much sweeteners such as honey or molasses. In my experience, it is possible to considerably reduce that amount or to skip the sweetener altogether.