I really enjoy cooking, but never have baking, until this week. I like cooking because there’s a good amount of fudge-factor in the amount of ingredients and cooking techniques which make me feel the final product is uniquely mine. If the recipe calls for finely chopped vegetables but I like larger, rustic pieces I can do so without fear that the final product will be inedible. Baking on the other hand is more like an exact science with very specific ratios of ingredients that have to work together and react in a specific way to produce moist cake, or a well-risen bread. I’m bad (read: do not like to) follow exact recipes so baking has never been that interesting. I can definitely appreciate why people like the exactness and reproduce-ability of baking, it is just not for me. On the other hand, I really like food producing methods that involve transformations. Things like beer and wine making, pickling, sauerkraut(ing?), start with a set of components and change them through a biological process into something completely different. That’s really cool. My definition of “cool” might differ from yours. But anyway…
Lyza and I were visiting with Andrea, Alex, and their new baby Lucia earlier this week and we started talking about brewing beer. Alex mentioned that he was also into baking and often used some of the spent grain from brewing in a loaf of bread. It sounded delicious and Lyza recently mentioned a “24 hour” bread technique she read about so I decided to give it a try, using some of the spent grain I knew I would have from an already planned brewing session with Carl.
Now, a bit of history: A few years ago Mrs. Pencil started and maintained a sourdough starter we affectionately named “Starty” (all living things in our house need a name, and it needs to end with the sound of “ee”. Except Chopper who is grand-fathered in, and myself and Lyza, for obvious reasons). It was pretty satisfying making our own sourdough bread with Starty, and the taste was great, but there were a few problems:
- We rarely had loaves that would rise enough. Usually the loaf would be too dense. We think our house was too cold for the yeast.
- The crust was never quite right. Professional bakeries use a steam injection oven which gives a nice, crackly crust but this is difficult to reproduce in the home. Lyza made good attempts at periodically splashing water into the oven while the load was baking, but with limited success.
- We went on vacation (honeymoon I think) for a couple weeks and without maintenance Starty turned rancid. RIP.
Fast forward to the present. I googled for “24 hour bread recipe” and the first two hits were all I needed to know (links below). Basically the method improves on traditional bread making in two key ways: First, no kneading! Instead of pummeling the dough for a while to organize the gluten chains, you just let it rise for a really long time (12-24 hours). This also allows for lots of bubbles to form in the dough which end up in the final loaf. Second, instead of needed to fill your oven with steam for an awesome crust, you bake the bread in a covered, pre-heated pot which kind of self-steams. Really, it works. Here’s picture proof:
Enough of my rambling — here comes the details. The following is a cut-n-paste form an email I sent to a friend so if it sounds like an email… well there you go.
The full recipe:
http://www.startribune.com/436
and a NYT article about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11
Here’s my distilled version:
- Mix together 3c bread flour, 1-1/2c water, 1/4 tsp yeast, and a good dash of salt (Lyza says it could up to a tbls)
- Cover the bowl with a lid or plastic wrap and let rise for ~20 hours
- Turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and form into a ball(ish). It works best to just turn the bowl upside down and let it slowly droop out rather than using a spoon since the dough will be very wet and sticky.
- Flour the top, cover with plastic wrap and let rise again until it is ~2x. 1-2 hours.
- Preheat a heavy pot and lid in the oven to 450
- When the preheat is done, drop the dough into the pot, replace the lid and put in the oven.
- Bake for 30 mins with the lid on, then remove the lid and bake a little longer until you think it is done. The first loaf we used a thermo until the center was 190 degrees then removed it. This was not enough. The second time I left it in for 15 mins (45 total) and the crust was definitely better (browner and cracklier) and the center was drier and lighter. The next time I’ll probably go 20-25 minutes.
- When you think it is done, remove it from the pot and let it rest for 15 minutes, then enjoy! It’s great when still warm and steaming with butter on it.
Let me know if you find any flavor additions that work well, or any techniques that help. I’ve been using a large Calphalon stock pot but might try a smaller Pyrex baking dish next to give it a little more shape.