As promised, here’s the EASY recipe I’ve been using to… er… bulk up the last week or two. I adapted it from Kathleen Flinn’s Kitchen Counter Cooking School, and we’ve been making a loaf a day. I recently started a sourdough starter and will share that, too, as soon as I figure out how to make sourdough bread.
Here’s yesterday’s effort. Doesn’t it look GOOD? Mmmm.
And now, without further ado, the recipe:
Karen’s Easy No-Knead Artisan Bread
(makes about 3 loaves)
INGREDIENTS
3 cups lukewarm water
1 tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon kosher or sea salt
6-1/2 cups unsifted unbleached all purpose white flour (or you can use half whole wheat flour, or bread flour)
Additional flour for shaping
Cornmeal or parchment paper (optional)
DIRECTIONS
Combine water, yeast and salt in 5-quart glass bowl. Stir to mix. Add flour and mix with a wooden spoon until dough is wet and sticky and all the flour has been incorporated. Cover with plastic wrap or lid (but do not seal airtight) and let rise for 2 hours at room temperature. (Once this is done, I usually make one loaf and put the rest of the dough in the fridge so I can grab a ball of dough and make bread once a day for the next two days; supposedly it keeps for up to two weeks.)
To make a loaf, lightly sprinkle flour onto dough’s surface. With clean, floured hands, scoop out a handful of dough about size of grapefruit and tear it away from the rest. Rub the dough with flour while gently stretching the top around to tuck the sides into the bottom to form a round, smooth ball. I like to turn the round on a floured board and pull part of the dough to the center, then turn the dough 90 degrees and pull the next edge to the center. Once I’ve gone all the way around the ball and it seems roundish, I twist the dough “ends” and then turn the ball over with the twisty seam at the bottom; this process seems to get me a taller, rounder loaf. If you’ve got parchment paper, put the dough on a square of it to rest. (I am not skilled enough to maneuver a pizza peel, but if you don’t have parchment paper, you can coat a flat cookie sheet or pizza peel with cornmeal or extra flour and put the dough on that to rise.)
Let the dough ball rise, uncovered, for at least half an hour or up to 90 minutes.
About 20 minutes before baking, preheat oven to 450° and put a covered Dutch oven or round casserole with a lid (I use a Corningware white casserole) into the oven. When you’re ready to pop the bread in, dust the loaf lightly with flour and slash the top with an “X” or 3 lines. Pick up the parchment paper with the dough on it (or slide it off your cookie pan/peel) and nestle it into the dutch oven or round casserole. Put the lid on and tuck it into the oven. (I let the parchment paper peek out the sides and it doesn’t affect anything.) Bake for 30 minutes, then take the lid off and bake for another 8-10 minutes to brown the loaf. The original recipe says to cool the loaf to room temperature, but who does that? I hack off a slice and eat it right away with butter. SO good.
If you make a batch of dough every three days, you’re only an hour away from fresh, hot bread all the time.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I have, and if I have luck with the sourdough version, I’ll post it soon!
Stay safe out there!
XOXO
Karen
