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Today's bread
BakingcookingFood

Weird bread

by Diane Duane April 9, 2020

Well, a little weird.

Ireland is on COVID-19 lockdown (and will be for the next couple/few weeks, it looks like), and our next grocery delivery isn’t until nearly the middle of next week, and there’s no telling whether there’ll be baking yeast in it. And yesterday we were down to our next-to-last packet of it. So I sighed and got ready to start employing stopgap measures. 

…And a quick note here: if you’re presently drawing breath to say “But I saw a post about how to make your own…” or “No one is ever really out of yeast, let me tell you how…!” — then please don’t, because there’s no need. I’ve been baking bread casually since my twenties and much more intensively over the last decade (Peter and I simply decided in unison that we’d had it with supermarket bread, and when we found the most dependable recipe imaginable, that was that). At one time or another I’ve built levains and starters from scratch, worked with sourdough starters more than a hundred years old, and have caught and cultured wild yeast on two continents. I’ve even written fiction about yeast, Thoth help me.

Anyway, right this minute—as a busy longtime-work-from-home small-businesswoman who is usually hip-deep in several universes at once while also doing website management—my preference for day-to-day baking is plain old active dry yeast of the Fleischmann’s, Red Star or SAF type. These have been genetically tailored for their work and suit my needs perfectly—being predictable, reliable, and in no need of coddling or extra attention. To be told “All you need to do is mix together some flour and water and let the natural yeasts…!”, etc etc, is for me (at the moment) too much like someone kindly offering to replace my missing Lotus Turbo Esprit with a Trabi. I will cope just fine, but I won’t sing paeans of praise about the alternative strategy. So let’s not go there, yeah? As KP says, “Please and thank you.”

Anyway. What was plain when I got the urge to bake yesterday afternoon was that I was going to have to throw together a preferment, because the thought of actually using up that last packet of yeast was giving me anxiety. Fortunately, when doing the last bake I’d used only 3/4 of the package of yeast, and had set aside the rest for this very purpose. So: 

(Stage 1) Find favorite handled soup cup. Spoon in a tablespoon or two of flour and that yeast, and stir it about well to get combined. Add about a quarter-teaspoon of sugar just to let the yeast know that, momentarily anyway, Life Is Unexpectedly Good. Add a quarter cup of water, or a little more if necessary, to make a thick paste. Then cover the cup (or other vessel) and put this whole business aside somewhere warmish for a couple of hours. (Note that no salt is involved in this procedure until making the actual bread dough, because the salt acts as an inhibitor and the last thing you want to do with the yeast at this point is get it feeling inhibited.)

(Stage 2) In a couple of hours there should be some bubbling going on. Stir the bubbles down, add half a cup of lukewarm water, enough flour to make another thick paste, and another quarter- to half-teaspoon of sugar, because keeping the yeasts extra happy/active at this point is smart. Mix it all up until it’s smooth and put the whole business aside for another couple of hours.

(Stage 3) Repeat the above routine one more time with about twice the ingredients, except for another half-teaspoon of sugar for the yeasts. Then off you go and spend another hour or so doing something else. If the bubbles aren’t pretty active in the bowl or cup or whatever when you get back, give it another hour. 

(Stage 4) And now we finally start actual breadmaking. Measure out about 200g of wholemeal/whole wheat bread flour and 400g of white bread flour. Stir in 10-12 g of salt (usually about a scant tablespoon). Add to this about 2/3 of the starter and about 350ml of water, and knead by hand or in a mixing bowl with a bread hook until it comes together and is smooth and silky-ish. 15 minutes or so by hand: in a mixer, six minutes on low speed and six minutes on high. Add more flour if necessary. Grease or oil a big bowl: put the dough in it and turn it so it’s evenly coated: cover it with plastic wrap and put it somewhere warm and comfy to rise. (I wrap mine up in a foam throw from Ikea. Works great.)

Because of the lowered raising capacity of this yeast—which is still getting up to speed—the rise takes significantly longer than usual. In this case it took something like four hours for the sponge to fill my raising bowl, which was fine, because I was binging The Rise of Phoenixes (while oblivious to the potential pun, don’t mind me, I catch on slow sometimes) and the plotting and backstabbing had seriously sped up from the previous ten episodes’ everybody-is-poisoning-everybody-else-with-slow-poisons-while-snarking-at-them arc.

At this point I hit pause long enough to punch the dough down… or actually, smoosh it down: it was very soft and sloppy. It was also larger than my normal loaf, because I’d had a put a fair amount of extra flour in to stabilize it. It became plain that (a) it was realistically too late to wait through a second rise and bake last night—which meant an overnight “cool rise” out on the sink in the boot room—and (b) if I put it in a regular loaf pan / tin to do that, it would overflow the thing in the middle of the night and make all kinds of mess. So I oiled a three-liter Les Cousances casserole, dumped the sponge in there, covered it with a tea towel, and left it to its own devices for the night. Then I went back to my binging, though not before adding more water and more flour to what was left of the preferment, and just a few pinches more of sugar, because so far at least the yeasts had been behaving Very Well and deserved a treat.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, here’s what the casserole looked like:

The risen bread splonge

So it was plain that it was now time to bake, yay! Oven up to 200C, then (when preheated) slid the casserole in and for good measure threw about 150ml of water into the roasting pan at the bottom, to make some steam. Timer set for 50 minutes, and off to do some email and other stuff.

When the timer went off, this is what we wound up with:

The finished loaf

It took another couple of hours for the loaf to cool and stabilize enough to slice safely. It’s a peculiar looking thing, but Peter came along and pronounced it one of the best bakes of this kind ever. (He’s fond of the pot-baking end of things: he’s quite good with the New York Times no-knead recipe.) Having had a couple of slices, I’m inclined to agree. Light: a delicate springy crumb, nice and open in the usual manner of slow-and-cool rises: definitely tasty. The crust’s a bit aggressive, but a night in a bread bag will sort that out.

…So that’s one way to do it. That said: I still want my damn active dry yeast. Meanwhile, the preferment is sitting in the office window, enjoying the warmth from the wood-burning stove, and it’s getting to be time to feed it a little again. (Because an online associate caused me to think of the torture-a-cinnamon-roll concept just now, and a yeast-raised cinnamon roll can be pretty good. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.)

…See, it’s even got a hat! 

The preferment and its hat

And for the moment, that’s all she wrote.

April 9, 2020
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The household bread recipe
BakingComicsEuropeHome lifeIreland

Bread and squirrels

by Diane Duane July 16, 2014

So last night I was working late-ish, and it occurred to me that this would be a good time to bake some bread. In particular I wanted to test the Odlums “strong white” bread flour to see how it behaved with the enhanced white bread recipe* I’ve been playing with, and how it stacked up against the Hovis “super strong” bread flour that I normally use.

The making actually only takes abut fifteen minutes: throw the ingredients together, then knead for six minutes at slow speed with the dough hook and six minutes at higher speed. Put it in a greased bowl, walk away. Back to work.

…Or theoretically back to work. When I sat down at the machine again I had a quick look at my Twitter feed and saw this:

Pencil structure. 8.6 x 7.3. 2014. Really? I’ve drawn comics all these years so I could draw a squirrel? Really? pic.twitter.com/J3UqrL6m1V— Walter Simonson (@WalterSimonson) July 15, 2014

Two things immediately occurred to me: (a) this was someone I had the pleasure of meeting way back when and hadn’t crossed paths with since, and (b) that was one mean-looking squirrel. So I tweeted him and we got to chatting.

And I forgot all about the bread, having (a little earlier) punched it down and shoved it in a loaf pan. (Forgot about the work, also, for the moment. But the bread was more likely to get stroppy in the very short term.) When I went back in the kitchen it was climbing out of the loaf pan in a very determined way. (Seriously, it shouldn’t get that high before you bake it…)

Anyway, it all came right in the end. This is how that loaf came out…

bread2

Not too bad. Taste testing comes later in the day.

*The enhancement: add 50g of oat bran and 50g of wheat germ to the basic Tessinerbrot recipe. This produces a bread in the “soft white/whole wheat” category beloved of marketers trying to get some kind of wholegrain content into breads that don’t look like they’ve got any, so that kids will [theoretically] eat them.

(See also this entry.  I think this may have the wrong picture attached to it: seriously, this bread always rises like crazy.)

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July 16, 2014
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Dough showing well developed gluten structure
cookingFoodHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeIrelandrecipes

Folklore, string structure, rye dough and Raymond Blanc (with afternotes on a bread recipe)

by Diane Duane March 6, 2013

I was making bread the other day and suddenly found a finger in it.

…Cognitively speaking. (Not a real finger, don’t panic….) But writers’ brains are such strange places sometimes. Here’s today’s example.

My short-term memory is a constant joke around here. You can (as happened this morning) tell me that the weather station’s batteries are kaput and can’t be charged in the normal battery recharger, meaning they have to be put into one of the more technologically challenged ones…  and I will still, two hours later, look at the weather station and remark, “Oh look, its batteries have finally gone south” — to the sound of ironic laughter from Himself Upstairs. (And I’ll then recall the whole previous conversation perfectly well, but will have mislaid it between times.) Some of this is Not Paying Attention, but other aspects of it are just Sixtyish Brain Fail.

However. Ask me for a quote from a book I read forty years ago, and no problem, there it is. As you shall hear…

So I’m working with this recipe from Raymond Blanc for the first time, because the other evening I went to sleep with the TV running (I sometimes  do) and it was showing an episode of Blanc’s “Kitchen Secrets” series from last year, the one about bread. Now, bread is a passion with me. (A master post about this will turn up in a day or three so I don’t keep losing some of the links I keep looking for.) Bad bread is everywhere — I can’t think of another place where Sturgeon’s Law applies so rigorously; in bread’s case it’s because of the pestilent ubiquity of something called the Chorleywood Bread Process. (More about this in another post, but originally this process was devised as a way to make decent bread in large quantities from the soft wheats that are all that will grow in the British Isles. It uses yeast as a flavoring rather than as a way to develop the bread naturally: gluten is developed in this process by violent physical agitation and the addition of ever-increasing types and amounts of additives. Ick.)

Good bread, though, is something I can’t get enough of. This is one of the reasons I love Switzerland so much. (German bread is almost as good as Swiss, generally, but the Swiss in my opinion have a slight edge.) And any way to make good bread at home is worth knowing about. Add to that the fact that it’s Raymond Blanc sharing his method for pain de campagne on this particular show, and there’s no way I wasn’t going to try it out as soon as I was conscious again. (I really like Blanc. Not only does his passion for good food burn with a pure bright flame that should be visible from space, but he’s funny, dry, not afraid to make fun of himself, and he doesn’t seem to feel the need to prove how great a chef he is by screaming at people.)

So this recipe: like most good country breads of central Europe, rye flour is involved. And rye is typically such a nuisance to work with. It makes the dough sticky, it’s a pain to clean up, it gets everywhere. There I am at the worktop this morning, dealing with the quite sticky dough — look at the way the gluten’s got it stringing in the image underneath here, so lovely — scraping it out onto the floured work surface and starting to get to grips with it. Or it with me, because any dough with rye in it has a life of its own beyond that of the yeast. I slice the dough into four and start shaping it, and the usual struggle for domination begins. It’s climbing up my wrists, it’s trying to attach itself to my clothes, it’s under my nails. I look down at the hands and sigh and wonder where the nail brush is.

image

And suddenly I see, in the back of my head, the image of a woman’s severed finger, her pinky to be precise, with a signet ring on it. And a voice speaks up from the depths of time, as it were in narration, or sort of a caption, and it says:

“…This cannot be my wife’s finger, because it’s got rye dough underneath the fingernail, and my wife has never kneaded rye dough in her life.”

And I stop what I’m doing and my mouth falls open. Not so much with the thought “Where the hell did that come from?”, because I know where it came from: I’m kneading rye dough, and the association was instantaneous. The thought that is now making me crazy is, “What fairy tale is that?”

And instantly I despair, because if there’s one thing we have a lot of in this house, it’s books of legends and fairy tales. It is going to take forever to settle this issue, and it’s going to drive me crazy until I do.

…And of course the despair doesn’t last that long. In another time it would have, because I’d have had to go through all those books. But these days, Google Is Our Friend many times every day. So once I manage to get the dough shaped (two baguettes, two oval loaves) and put aside for the dough’s second rising, I go off to Google and search on the phrase “has been kneading rye dough”. Too precise. Knock it back to “kneading rye dough” and “fairy tale” and only one result comes up: a reference to the great Welsh epic tale, the Mabionigion.

So now I know where I am without really having to check the backstory (though I do anyway to see if I remember the setup correctly). And some detail comes up that makes me laugh, because the dialogue might as well have come out of Sherlock Holmes as out of the man who actually utters it, a Welsh Prince named Elphin.

The original material is here and on the page after. (It is, as I expected, Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion, which goes back to 1849. (ETA: the pages aren’t displaying at the moment — you may need to check their cached versions at Google.)  But let me sum it up for you.

Elphin has been lucky enough to pull out of a weir in a river near his home a miraculous child, the (soon to be famous) prophet, bard and wizard Taliesin. Elphin takes the child home and he and his wife more or less adopt this prodigy (which frankly is a smart move). Then after a while Elphin has to go off to spend Christmas with his uncle, a petty king named Maelgwyn. There is a lot of sucking up to Maelgwyn by all and sundry during this period, especially on the subject of his queen, who is more beautiful and modest and graceful and blah de blah de blah than all the other women in the kingdom, or so everybody keeps telling Maelgwyn, this being the local level of Speaking Truth To Power, i.e. Not Very High.

Well, somewhere in this process — and it’s only fair to suggest, though gently, that these islands being what they are at Christmas, Drink Has Been Taken — somewhere in here, Elphin, who loves his wife a lot,  actually commits the tactical error of saying what he’s thinking: that his wife is pretty damn beautiful and graceful and modest and blah de blah de blah on her own, thank you very much, and at least as much so as the queen. …Well, you can see where this is going. Maelgwyn throws Elphin’s butt into the dungeon and sends a courtier off to see if Elphin’s wife is all she’s cracked up to be.

The man sent off to do this is a schmuck named Rhun (“the most graceless man in the world: there was neither wife nor maiden with whom he had held converse but he was afterwards evil-spoken of”). Rhun heads for Elphin’s castle with the intent to prove that Elphin’s wife is in fact not what she’s cracked up to be, thereby gaining favor with Maelgwyn.

It’s at this point that little Taliesin, who plainly has his prophecy engine fully engaged, tells Elphin’s wife that a jerk is heading in their direction to dishonor her. “So here,” says the baby prophet/bard, “is what you’re going to do. Find one of your housemaids. Dress her in your clothes and jewelry. Sit her down at table as if she was having dinner. Let Rhun the Jerk find her instead of you. What happens is not going to be pretty, sorry about that, but it’s her or you.”

And so it is done. Rhun shows up, finds this woman looking like Elphin’s noble wife and doing the things he thinks she should be doing, and he gets to work. She invites him to dinner (typical Celtic hospitality), indeed dinner and supper, and sometime during supper he drugs her wine. She falls over unconscious, and Rhun chops off her pinky — with Elphin’s signet ring on it — and bears it away as “proof” that Elphin’s wonderful wife got so plastered with a total stranger that she didn’t even feel this happening. (The implication being, of course, that he could have done, and maybe did do, all kinds of other things to her as well.)

So Rhun returns to his master, shows him the finger, and Maelgwyn is very pleased. He has Elphin brought up out of the dungeon and “chides him”, saying (I’m paraphrasing here), “Look, dummy, you ought to know that you can’t trust a woman any further than you can throw her, and here’s the proof: your wife’s finger, your signet ring, what can you possibly say?”

Elphin takes one look at the finger and says, “Lord, no question that’s my ring: everybody knows what that looks like. But as to the finger? A few things. First, this wouldn’t even stay on my wife’s thumb, her fingers are so small. But you can see from the marks how the thing’s been forced onto this finger. Second, my wife cuts her nails once a week: Saturday nights, actually. This nail hasn’t been trimmed for a month. And third… if you look under this nail, you’ll see that whoever it belonged to was kneading rye dough in the last three days. And my wife, being a gently-reared princess, has never kneaded rye dough in her natural life. Soooo…”

Needless to say, cheeking a King like this to his face gets Elphin’s butt chucked back in the dungeon again. But it’s all right, because Taliesin the Wonder Kid is on the case. He heads off to Maelgwyn’s castle, springs his foster-father, makes everyone else look profoundly stupid, and otherwise generally saves the day. (You still feel kind of sorry for the poor housemaid, though.)

…Meanwhile, all I can do is sit here and wonder at the human brain, which can pull a fairly complete memory of something like this out of the depths of decades‘ worth of time (because it has to be easily thirty years since I last read the Mabinogion through ) at the mere invocation of the phrase “kneading rye dough”.

Sheesh.

Anyway, now all I have to do is get the rest of the rye out from under my nails…

image

Now that I’ve made this recipe twice: just a thought or three (below the cut) for those of you who might be thinking of attempting it.

First of all: seriously, spring for bread flour if you’re going to make this. The first time I did the recipe it was with a standard Irish “strong white” flour. Not that the results weren’t just fine. But the second time, I used a flour that was a lot heavier on the hard wheat, and the results were significantly better.

Secondly, about the kneading times: This is serious business here. Blanc is very specific about the times in the basic recipe, and following them pays off. The first kneading period is more about mixing and letting the liquid be absorbed, as he says: the second is about developing the gluten in the flour. Then, after the first rise, even though the resulting dough is incredibly sloppy-looking, it is also surprisingly easy to manage once you start shaping it. Hint here: don’t be afraid to use a fair amount of extra flour to make the shaping easier, but at the same time try to knead as little of that extra flour into the shaped dough as you can. (This recipe has caused me to look at all other recipes I’ve used that have cautioned against “overkneading” and made me wonder whether I’ve actually been underkneading all this while.)

Another note: this dough flops out fairly flat as it rises the second time. If you want a higher-standing loaf, use a high-sided pan. (For the baguette above I used a specialist baguette pan.) You could do this recipe in standard loaf pans and it’d work fine, as far as I can tell. But you get more / better crust if you bake it naked. (NB: you would need four US-sized loaf pans if you choose to do it that way. Supported, no question that this dough would fill them.) Additionally: during the second rise I spritzed the loaves with water a few times (mostly because I was out of saran wrap / clingfilm with which to cover them, and had fallen back on damp towels tented over the loaves on upended glasses. This worked very well. May have made the crusts a little crisper as well).

Also, re pre-baking prep: You can eggwash the shaped dough before baking if you like, but it’s not necessary. The baguette above was baked naked and looks nice enough.  (Probably also more traditional that way: I doubt that pain de campagne is eggwashed when baked on its home ground.)

Re the yeast: Fresh works better if you can get it. Specifically, the bread’s flavor is improved.

Re additives: I put caraway in the baguettes the second time around (I’ve always been a sucker for a good Jewish rye, something which is a bit thin on the ground in Ireland). It worked brilliantly.

…So there you have it. This is a bread very much worth making. (I tell you… slices of that baguette still warm, with Boursin smeared all over them: OMNOMNOM.)

March 6, 2013
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Food, restaurants and cookingHome liferecipes

That crumpet recipe

by Diane Duane July 23, 2008

Click here to go to the crumpet recipe: a new window will open
Click here for the crumpet recipe
 

Here in the depths of Ireland, if I want crumpets, I have to make them myself: the local supermarket doesn’t carry them. This is okay, though, because there’s no way a store-bought crumpet can compare with one just baked. However, there are a lot of crumpet recipes out there that don’t work. Either the batters come out too thick — so the bubbles can’t break and leave the necessary holes on top — or they’re too sloppy, and the bubbles either come out too small to let the melted butter in, or break too soon, so that again you wind up with a “blind” bake with no holes.

Fortunately, the batter in the recipe above works perfectly. My only alteration to this recipe: I add two packages of yeast instead of one. It seems to improve the flavor.  Also, you don’t really need the two kinds of flour for this recipe — they’re preferable, but not absolutely necessary. Just make sure you beat the batter the full two minutes the first time. You want to make sure the gluten develops enough.

BTW, there’s no need for special crumpet rings: I use regular-size tuna cans with the tops and bottoms taken off (we have one of those can openers that mills the edges smooth). Butter them well inside between each batch. It’s pretty easy to use a flat knife to knock the rings up and off the crumpets as soon as the outsides are solid: that way you can set them aside to cool so you can handle them as soon as the crumpets in the pan or on the griddle or bakestone are done.

When you toast these, do it under the grill / broiler, or in a toaster oven that lets you do just one side. Then… the butter.

NOM NOM NOM NOM. 

Tags: crumpet, bread, toast, bakestone, home+baking, butter, griddle

July 23, 2008
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Food, restaurants and cookingHome lifeMediaUncategorized

Lahey No-Knead Bread recipe: one baker’s experiences so far

by Diane Duane December 9, 2006

Like (it seems) about half the Internet-connected bread bakers on the planet, I’ve been experimenting with the New York Times-published recipe from Sullivan Street Bakery’s Jim Lahey for no-knead bread. (The original NYT article, which talks more about the recipe’s genesis, is here. The article discussing the ensuing discussion, and suggesting possible fine-tuning, is here.)

(Also — I keep forgetting that the NYT wants you to register to read anything. There’s a version of the recipe in the clear on this weblog: and a pictorial essay of someone making it here. Additionally, there’s a video here that doesn’t seem to require registration.)

The basic idea is surprisingly simple. Mix up the bread dough to a really-thick-batterlike consistency, then let it rise cool and very slow rather than warm and fast. We’re talking an eighteen- to twenty-four-hour rise here (though I’ve done it in as little as twelve). Shape it minimally and turn it out onto a floured cloth for a secondary rise (two hours or so). Then bake it in a preheated, lidded pot. This treatment generates the confined live steam that provokes that coveted pain-de-campagne-type crust….and you don’t have to shell out something like $3000 for an oven with a steam injector.

So far I’ve done the bread about five times, with varying flour mixtures and equipment. All of them have turned out at least tolerably well. A couple of times they’ve been spectacular: when you hear the bread’s crust making that crackle-crackle noise as it cools, you know you’ve got a winner. The loaves rise nicely and have a nice springy crumb, not at all too solid.

Discussions about this bread are going on here and there. My two cents, for anyone reading this who’s seen the recipe and is interested in trying it:

(a) All my efforts have been with garden-variety UK/Irish style “plain” / “strong white” flour. This has worked all right, but I suspect proper bread flour would work better, as our flour tends to be strong on the soft wheats and can therefore be a little disappointing in the gluten department. Adding rye flour is OK (I was using Doves Farm organic stoneground rye), as far as about 15% of the total amount. (The first recipe was measured in cups: fortunately the “fine-tune” article offers conversions to volume, which in my opinion work better for baking.) I liked the rye version best, especially the one I did with a lot of caraway seeds, but then I’m a Jewish-rye freak.

(b) The highest possible temperatures in the preheating (noncommercial) oven are vital. We have a fan oven which is officially rated for 230° C but actually achieves closer to 240°. I understand trying to work at this temperature is a problem for people working with modern Le Creuset pots, which have plastic handles that are vulnerable to heats that high. Fortunately, all our ironware is vintage Le Cousances, with metal handles, and these pots shrug off such minor problems. (Annoyingly, Le Creuset bought the Le Cousances company in order to get hold of their rival’s name and put them out of business, boo hiss boo. So they have the name now, but the pots being sold as “Le Creuset Cousances” are in my opinion nowhere near as good as the originals…and have those miserable plastic knobs. Fortunately, you can still find the older, better Cousances pots on eBay — here’s one, for example.) Anyway, if your oven won’t go past 220° C / 450° F, just start your preheating really early — give that pot an hour or so in there at top heat — and I’d guess things will still probably work out OK.

(c) This may be the wettest, floppiest bread dough you will ever have seen. Don’t panic. It’s going to be all right. Don’t overflour it during the short time you’re shaping it after the first rise, and have something handy to scrape your work surface with; because there’s just no way out of it, this stuff is going to stick to something sooner or later. (Mostly you.)

(d) Don’t be afraid that the dough’s going to stick to the baking vessel when you dump it in there. For some reason, it absolutely will not. It’s miraculous that way.

(e) You don’t need a huge pot for this. A small one does fine, especially considering that the dough is so floppy. The Cousances pot I was using has a 2-liter capacity.

(f) The ensuing bread tastes really good. If you make this, better buy more butter.

…I’ve been thinking about trying this recipe out in a clay baker: I’ll go halfway with that tomorrow and try doing the loaf in a clay loaf pan inside the biggest lidded iron pot. We’ll see how that turns out. If it’s nice, I’ll put up a picture here. (Hey, even if it’s not nice. This is all an experiment, after all…)

(ETA November 25, 2016: Peter’s been testing out the recipe, too. Here’s one he made earlier.)

peters_bread

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December 9, 2006
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    Lahey No-Knead Bread recipe: one baker’s experiences so far

    December 9, 2006
  • 3

    Seed cake: a recipe

    January 1, 2013
  • 4

    Young Wizards New Millennium Editions: a little more info

    May 30, 2011
  • 5

    The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, The Death of Sherlock Holmes and How The World Took It)

    January 17, 2012

Associated websites


...all divisions of the
Owl Springs Partnership

Previously on “Out Of Ambit”…

2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series

Maluns

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”

From the Young Wizards universe: an update

Irish life: The things you don’t discuss, Halloween...

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