The one potentially exciting insight Cathy gave me into home cooking was the idea of 'no knead' bread. I love bread but am sorely lacking in the bread baking skill department. I maintain this is a result of my poor kneading technique. Consequently the idea of no knead bread fills me with delight!
To be perfectly honest though, what the bread lacks in human effort, it makes up for in time required. I've now tried this recipe twice: the first time it took the bread almost 15 hours to 'bubble' as Cathy puts it. The second recipe was much quicker (as I 'helped' it along by doubling the yeast and increasing the liquid quantities) and it took about 10 hours.
Nevertheless the bread is quite tasty: it's rather dense almost like Rye bread so darker flour probably works better. There is nothing more fun than serving a home cooked loaf and it is an easy if time heavy process, so in that sense its well worth the 'foresight' required.
No Knead Bread
Ingredients
3 cups of flour
1/4 tsp of yeast (although I upped it to 1/2 to quicken the process)
1 1/2 cups of water
1/2 tsp salt
whatever flavours you would like to add.
Method
- Put all the ingredients into a bowl and mix to a sticky dough
- Leave the dough for 12 hours or so until bubbles appear on the surface
- Take the bubbling dough and place it on a heavily floured surface. Shape into a dough mound shape and leave to rest for 15 minutes.
- Fold the bread in half and in half again to make a bread shape.
- Leave it to rise between 2 heavily floured teatowels for approximately 2 hours.
- Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and place a casserole dish in the oven to warm up.
- Once the bread has risen, carefully transfer it to the casserole dish and bake with the lid on for 30 minutes.
- Remove the lid and brown the crust for another 10 minutes.
Cathy's blog includes a number of recipe ideas for the bread, including this tasty looking cinnamon raisin number.
