Bread, bread and more bread

Well April and May have been all about bread here in the Palmer household. It all started when I noticed a growing buzz on the Internet around a bread recipe featured on the New York Times a year or two back. The appealing part of the recipe was that it required very little work and resulted in a fantastic looking (and apparently fantastic tasting) loaf. I had first come across this recipe last year some time but I lacked an important item used in the recipe, a heavy pot. That all changed however when T and I took a trip to Seattle and popped in to the outlet mall on the way. There we came across a Le Creuset store, and they were having a sale too! Well it didn't take too much convincing to get T to let me buy one, I just had to let her choose the colour. So we are now happy owners of a bright yellow Le Creuset cast iron/enamel pot. I'm not sure how we are going to get this heavy thing back to New Zealand, but I'm sure we will find a way.

So now that the missing pot was not a factor we could get on to baking wonderful home made bread whenever we wanted.... so long as we thought about it 20 hours ahead of time. All you have to do is mix up the dough to combine, then let it sit out for 18 hours, then give it a quick shape and rest it for another 2 hours before baking in a very hot oven in our yellow pot with the lid on for the first 20 minutes or so.


So here are a few photos of the no knead bread...


The bread after the initial 18 hour rise


Fresh out of the oven (and our cool yellow pot in the background


And just moments before it was devoured.


While looking at websites with the no knead bread I came across an interesting recipe for German Pancakes. So for dessert one night we decided to give it a try. We have since made it a couple more times. It is super quick and easy and looks really cool when it is in the oven puffing up.



Now our no knead bread is pretty jolly good, if I do say so myself. But when my sister-in-law Sharon mentioned there was a recipe for bread in 5 minutes a day I just had to look in to it more. She had just received a cookbook called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and they have a rather useful website too. T had just joined the library and after a quick check we realised that the library has several copies of the book, so we put a request in for one and within a week I had a copy of the book in my hands. Oh the excitement. The whole deal with this technique is you mix up a big batch of dough - a rather wet dough - in a big bucket or container and then just let it sit in the fridge until you want to use some. Then you cut off a chunk of dough, shape it and let it rise before baking it in a pretty hot oven. There are a bunch of different types of dough in the book. So far we have tried the basic white dough, a peasant loaf, a brioche (very yummy), a challah dough (similar to brioche but not as rich), an olive oil dough, and now today we mixed up a Deli-Style Rye. Hmm, that is a lot of bread for less than a month, especially considering that we have made the white one at least 2 times, and each batch of dough makes about 4 small loaves.

So far we have not managed to make a basic white loaf that competes with the NY times no knead bread recipe, but the versatility of these doughs is particularly handy. We have made many basic loaves, a few pizzas, pita bread, naan bread, baguettes, cinnamon buns, brioche loaf, monkey bread (sooooo good). The brioche dough was particularly nice, it made the most delicious cinnamon buns, and they were not even as bad for us as the recipe in the book (we didn't make them too gooey with sugar and butter etc.). We undid all that being good a few days later though with the monkey bread. Little balls of dough dipped in butter then rolled in cinnamon and sugar, stacked in a loaf pan and baked to be a loaf that pulls apart. To help overcome the guilt we have had to start going to the gym in our building. Anyway we are very much enjoying this new bread technique and now own our very own copy of the book. And another great side effect is I now have even more food stuff to take photos of. So far the loaves all look very "rustic", but they are meant to be, so don't laugh at my wonky baguette please.