No Knead Bread Baked in a Dutch Oven

I love the New York Times’ food journalist, Mark Bittman, for many reasons: his inspiring recipe ideas, quirky how-to videos, but mostly because he made me feel like a bona fide Julia-freaking-Childs today. I followed his famous No Knead Bread recipe (with a few additions here and there, of course) and created what I believe to be my most glorious culinary moment. (See photo above, I made that!)

As the recipe implies, there is no kneading, sweating or grunting involved in this recipe. You basically pour a bunch of stuff in a bowl, wait a few hours for everything to “proof”, bake it in the oven, and et voilà you have a bread masterpiece! I highly recommend you try making this or a similar No Knead Bread recipe floating around in cyberspace if you want to impress your coworkers, in-laws or seduce a hungry partner.

Here is the basic recipe from the NYT:

3 cups all-purpose flour, more for dusting (I used half wheat flour)
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast (if you can’t find instead yeast, you can use 1/3 teaspoon of active yeast instead)
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1-2 drops of red wine vinegar
Optional add-ins: 1/2 cup of cheese (like Asiago, Parmesan, Blue) and or 1/2 cup of nuts or olives
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast, red wine vinegar and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups of hot water and stir until blended. Cover with plastic wrap and allow dough to rest 3-4 hours at room temperature.

2. When the dough looks bubbly, place dough on a lightly floured surface. Sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Loosely cover with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Lightly coat your hands with flour and gently shape the dough into a ball. Coat a clean cotton kitchen towel with flour, what bran or cornmeal and put dough seem side down. Dust the dough with more flour, bran or cornmeal and cover it with another cotton towel. Let rise for 2 hours. The dough will roughly double in size and lazily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. Heat oven to 450 degrees and heat a large covered pot (preferably cast iron) in the oven for 30 minutes. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Drop the dough into the pot seam side up. Shake the pot a few times to evenly distribute the dough, cover with a lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and bake additional 15 to 30 minutes, or until crust is golden brown. Remove from pot and cool on rack for 30 minutes.

Tagged as: Mark Bittman, no knead bread, olives, parmesan