Food: Bread Baking

I've always been interested in making homemade bread---I tend to be a "starch" kind of guy, as I need some type of carbohydrates in my meals, which tends to be rice the majority of times, but pasta, bread, and potatoes are pretty good too.  Luckily I still have a high metabolism, so I'm still pretty scrawny.

However, baking bread is kind of intimidating.  Baking in general is kind of a mysterious art.  It's the one type of cooking where you really can't deviate from the recipe at all.  I've used my mom's bread machine before, and while it works, it makes typical "bread machine" bread.  At work, we had an instrument consultant stop by who recommended The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  It's a pretty good book going over the history of bread and filled with lots of recipes, but it makes baking sound even more intimidating.  You need a dense baking stone to maintain a high temperature.  You need to keep a pan of water in the oven and mist the walls in the beginning to make sure you get good caramelization and browning of the crust.  There are different flours and different yeasts.  This sounded like a lot more work than I thought.  We tried looking for baking stones, but they tended to be pretty expensive.  We even tried looking for rough cut quarry stones from local hardware stores as a replacement (they're only a couple of bucks rather than a hundred), but they were all out.

When my friends Luke and Jenny visited, they let me know of this easy bread recipe from Mark Bittman at the New York Times.  There's even a Youtube video demonstrating the procedure.  Apparently it's so easy that even "a 4-year-old could master it".  All you need is flour, salt, instant yeast, and water.  You also let the bread do a slow fermentation and rise over 18 hours.  The real trick here is that you bake the bread in a cast iron dutch oven---the cast iron helps retain the heat so you don't need a separate baking stone.  Plus, you leave the pot covered for part of the baking time---as a result, the water from the dough is trapped and creates a high humidity environment that helps form the crust.  It's pretty ingenious.  Is there anything cast iron can't do?

So we gave the recipe a spin.  It's very strange.  The dough is very wet and almost slimy and it's not like any other dough that I've made before.  But since you slow ferment it, you don't need to do any kneading.  And it works.  After about a day, you pretty much just throw the dough ball into a preheated cast iron pot and bake it.  Afterwards, you just pop out a classic loaf of bread.  The crust is crackly and has a nice, golden brown color.  The interior is nice and soft.  It's almost like a loaf of artisan bread.  And it really is easy enough that a four-year-old could do it.  We made an oyster chowder to go with it and dipped the bread in...mmm...delicious...

We've already made it again.  This recipe is only for a typical white bread, so now we're interested in looking at other variations.  Now that we know you can use a dutch oven, it might be worth looking at that bread book again...