NO KNEAD BREAD 

This is one of my favorite recipes.  It's super easy and the results are fantastic.  

A member of the club I work at told me about this bread a couple of months ago.  She gave me the New York Times article it was mentioned in and told me I had to make it.  (If you can find the article on the internet, I recommend reading it.)  She was super excited about it.  At the time I couldn't understand why.  It seemed like your normal bread recipe.  However, after making it, I realized it's not.  I caught the fever and started telling everyone I knew about this bread.  (If you google "no knead bread" there are tons of blogs on this recipe alone.)

So What's the Big Deal? 

So what? Bread recipes have been around forever.  This recipe, however, is being touted as a "revolutionary" recipe.  It is a recipe in which the processes of kneading the dough has been replaced by time.  That's not the revolutionary part.  The author of this recipe (Jim Lahey) has basically made this bread full-proof.  You really can't mess it up!

Here's how it works.  When you knead dough you are developing gluten strands within the dough.  Gluten toughens a bread and forms the nice little holes inside the loaf (something you want in a nice crusty loaf).  Mr. Lahey instead allows the yeast to develop the gluten overnight.  So, it's like having a million microscopic bakers working on your dough while you sleep. Then, in the morning, you just let the dough sit a little bit, pop it into the oven, and in about 45 minutes you have an awesome crusty loaf perfect for panini sandwiches or for dipping with oil.

The best part of this recipe is that it allows for variation.  I have added fresh herbs (Rosemary is great) to the bread.  Just make sure you add it to the flour before adding the water.  You can also make a great beer bread.  I've substituted Guinness Beer for the water and used the bread for Reuben sandwiches.

I highly recommend trying this recipe.  After I made this bread for my chef at work, he had me start using this recipe for a number of different events.  (If you can mold the dough into a baguette shape, it works perfectly for cheese.)  Once you've made it and tasted it, you'll be hooked.  After you've mastered the recipe, I suggest experimenting with different variations.   Its cheap, easy, and fun. (Sounds like someone I know).

Enjoy!

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The Minimalist: The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work

Published: November 8, 2006

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups water

Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed (for dusting)

1. In a large bowl combine flour and salt.  Mix.  Add yeast.   Add water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes (you'll probably only need another 10-15 minutes...keep an eye on it), until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

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(May 23rd) SIDENOTE:

My trip is coming up this Saturday!  Thank god!  I leave for my week long Italian Get-away.  As instructed, I will post daily blog updates as to what I've learned, how much wine I've drunk, and what kind of trouble I got myself into.  Feel free to check back daily between Saturday May 26th to Monday June 3rd.  Ciao!

After a crazy day of security checkpoints and no sleep the night before, I finally arrived in Milan – Linate. I’ll skip the part about how annoying and confusing the airport in London was.

The views from the plane when arriving where absolutely gorgeous. The area near the airport, I later found out, is mostly rice fields. So, as you come into Milan, the land almost looks like a quilt. Looking down from the plane you see a patchwork of different colors and shapes which are the rice fields. The airport (Milan-Linate) is quite small and old. In fact, when you get off the plane, you exit onto the tarmac and they bus you to the terminal. It was very 1950’s rockstar. There is a larger more modern airport, but it is used for larger commercial flights.

I lucked out and got a head of everybody going through customs. They were checking us in pretty slow. I also lucked out and didn’t lose any luggage! Thank God!

So I met up with our ICIF contact, Roseanna. She is such so super nice. She is your typical beautiful Italian woman. Very knowledgeable and funny, too. In the end there were supposed to be 7 of us from the United States on this trip.

Unfortunately, only five of us got there on time. Jared and Rand are both CIA students from New York. Laura is a student from Washington. And Annie is a student all the way from Maui. Rand was not as fortunate as the rest of us. His luggage did not show up on the flight. (As of now, the airline is still trying to track it down.) We decided to wait as long as we could (about an hour) to see if the other two students were somewhere in the airport. They were not. We figured they must not have made the connecting flight from London to Milan because of the change in flights from NY to London. So after an hour, we left without them. Since the airline would not tell us if they were on the flight or not, we had no way to contact them. So if they did show up later, they would be stranded (which would turn out to be the case).

The school is 2 hours south west of Milan by car. The scenery around Milan was pretty typical of any industrial/major city. It got more interesting as we headed towards the school (which will be referred to as The Castle from here on in). The little town (which I’m still not sure the name of), has a population of at least 6,000 people (according to Roseanna). This is where I became the typical tourist and brought out my camera to snap a bunch of pictures. The scenery is so beautiful. It’s your typical Italian landscape. Plaster buildings with red tile roofs and vineyards surrounding it. The dorms are…interesting. I ended up having to room with Jared and Rand. (The two other guys who didn’t make it would room together in another dorm). The only really nice thing about our accommodations is that the bathroom is huge (it has a bidet, aka the fun other toilet) and there is a balcony to walk out onto. Although the view is really nothing as it looks out into the courtyard and the surrounding apartment buildings.

So after settling in and unpacking, we changed and headed out to Magdelena’s. It’s a local restaurant that specializes in pizza. (Sidenote: Rand had actually visited the school before, so he was a little familiar with the town. He also is the only one of us who knows Italian so he’s acting as interpreter as well). The restaurant is the most popular in town. It was already packed by 8 o clock. Luckily the school made reservations and we had a table waiting for us. We started off with an antipasto appetizer which consisted of a chilled calamari salad, Vitello Tunato (sliced veal with a tuna mayo), beef carpaccio (raw beef with shaved parmigano reggiano), a roasted yellow pepper stuffed with what we believed was tuna or some sort of fish, and a slice of fresh bufalo mozzarella with fresh herbs. Very good.

The pizza in Italy is totally different than pizza in the US. The crust is much thinner and the sauce is made with fresh tomatoes and very little herbs. They use very little sauce as well. Also, you can totally taste the difference between an American tomato and an Italian tomato. It is fresh, sweet, and has that just from the garden flavor. Yummy. There’s nothing like it. Their pizzas are topped with not so typical ingredients like artichokes, prosciutto, tuna, and blue cheese. Sorry, no pepperoni at this joint. The pizzas were also individual sized/and boy were they tasty. I ordered the 4 Stagiani. It had ham, mushrooms, cheese, and artichokes divided into quarters on the pizza. Excellent!

You can’t think Italy without thinking wine. We decided to get a carafe of the house red with dinner. Woooowee was that stuff strong. Good, but strong. We noticed that getting wine is a lot cheaper than getting water in some places. They also like to mix things into their wine and make them into cocktails.

Dessert was an order of tiramisu that we all shared. Everyone was pretty full, but you can’t go to Italy and not try tiramisu. Honestly, it tasted like tiramisu from the US. In reality it is a simple dessert that you really can’t change too much. It was fair.

So after dinner, we decided to walk around the town at night. It was the perfect end to a long day. The town is quaint and charming. It’s also very hilly (great butt workout) and has such history. The castle is at the top of the highest hill and looks out over the town. It is currently going through some outside renovations, so the pictures I took have scaffolding around them. We decided to stop for a quick nightcap at a local bar. I had red wine with Campari (a liquor), seltzer, and a slice of orange. Delicious. That’s pretty much it. We went back to the dorms to get ready for day number 3, olive oil!

(Please excuse the spelling errors. I am typing this at five in the morning and Word’s spell check doesn’t pick up on Italian words. Also, the wireless internet connection only works in the breakfast room downstairs. Why am I up at 5 in the morning? Because I can’t sleep. It’s been a little gusty outside and the wind has been blowing around doors and windows. So every time I fall asleep, I get woken up with a BANG! It’s a little scary. Plus the hall light outside our door keeps going on and off. Ghosts perhaps?)

Bad news:  I can't upload pictures to this blog page from Italy. It takes way too long because the files are so large.  So go to

http://new.photos.yahoo.com/briguyinil@sbcglobal.net/albums

to view the pictures.