Dana’s Rustic Loaf
Morning of the day before:
20 ounces unbleached white flour
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
1 scant teaspoon yeast
2 cups cold water
Stir all ingredients together into a gooey dough. Spray lightly with oil, cover tightly with saran wrap, and let sit overnight on the counter. It will double, if not more.
The morning of the next day, use spatula to gently fold dough over on itself.
Spray lightly with oil, cover tightly with saran wrap, and let rise until double, 4 – 6 hours.
Heat oven to 450F, with cast iron dutch oven with lid on in the oven.
When oven is heated, remove dutch oven and lid from oven. With oiled spatula encourage dough gently into dutch oven. Shake dutch oven to round and center dough. Spray dough lavishly with water, cover, and put in oven. Bake 50 minutes.
Reduce oven temperature to 425F, remove lid, and bake for 20 minutes more.
Cool in dutch oven for ten minutes. Place on rack. Brush with olive oil and sprinkle with kosher salt. Try not to eat it all at one sitting. Try hard.
Cook’s homage:
This recipe began with Jim Lahy’s Sullivan Street Bakery No-Knead Bread recipe in the New York Times. All respect to Mr. Lahy, I see no need to ruin a perfectly good dish towel.
Cook’s tips:
*Use the best quality flour you can find. I use Bob’s Red Mill Unbleached White, or I used to before Covid and supply chain issues. Fortunately this recipe works with any flour.
*I get my bread water out of the refrigerator dispenser. It’s filtered. This bread seems to really like it.
*Do you dry out yogurt before you eat it? Substitute the liquid drained from said yogurt (called whey) for the water in this recipe. It gives an interesting, ever so slightly sour flavor to the bread.
*Stick the dough in the refrigerator for either rise. It will take longer to double but it won’t hurt it a bit.
Cook screwing with the recipe even more:
*For this batch, I substituted 5 ounces of whole wheat flour for 5 ounces of the unbleached white flour. A visiting friend likes brown bread. It didn’t rise as fast or as much but it tasted fine.
Dana, For my bread I added about a cup of spent grain from some homebrew my son and I made. It was amazing. I bet you could visit one of the breweries near your home and ask for some.
Thanks Dana!
Until today my kitchen and I were bread making virgins..looking forward to the results tomorrow! Much easier than I thought it would be so far. I have a sneaking suspicion though that day two of the great bread making experiment may pose a challenge beyond my capabilities! Dare I say it..I’m proud to say I tried and I’ll eat it no matter how it turns out x
Oh. I use a lovely cool rise recipe that lets you make it the day before, and leave it in the fridge over night. Then bake it off in the morning, or whenever. I love it because I can have hot fresh baked bread first thing in the morning, without getting up at 4 a.m. to make it happen.
Sometimes I stick the first rise in the fridge, Ginny. Doesn’t hurt it a bit.
Avais36, let me know how it turns out!
Scott, that sounds positively yummy. I shall investigate. I know Homer has a brewer, I just don’t know where it is.
I bake a couple varieties of no-knead bread. My favorite (only) flour is King Arthur. It’s available online, & if you sign up for their emails, they offer free shipping a few times a year. Their 9-grain cereal is wonderful in whole-grain breads.
If I want it a little sweeter, will more sugar affect the rise?
No idea. Give it a shot and let me know!
I’ve started making a no-knead beer rye bread – https://www.thespruceeats.com/beer-rye-bread-no-knead-3062240. Same technique but different ingredients, obviously. I’ve been having fun trying different beers. So far, amber ale is the winner and IPA is definitely the loser (very bitter bread).
I have no means of weighing flour except by using a postal scale. Can I safely use a volume equivalent? How many cups would 20 oz of flour equal? Normally when I make no-knead bread I use 3 or 3 1/2 cups.
Google “dry ounces to cups.” Bound to be something on the Intertoobz to help.
I figured out how to use my postal scale — it’s not meant to weigh more than a few oz of mail, so the amount of flour in the recipe is very approximate. It ended up being about 3 3/4 cups of flour. The resulting dough consistency is pretty much like other no-knead batches I’ve made — so I think my measurements will do. Thanks for your reply and for the recipe.
What over type of pan can I use since I don’t have a dutch oven with a lid?
It has to be oven-proof, Lois. That’s really the main thing.
Thanks for posting this again – I can’t wait to try it out. It sounds like it take some practice.
Dana, the Homer Brewing Company is here: http://www.homerbrew.com/index.html – we like artisanal beer and thus visited when in Homer. Their beer is excellent.
I have used your recipe at least 25 times, Dana. I often make it x 1 1/2 for company. I tell people it’s the easiest bread to make, then I tell them it takes two days!
I had to Google ounces to grams since that’s the way my scale works. I used molasses instead of sugar. Last messing with recipe bit – I didn’t bake it as long because in my old age, we struggle with a crusty crust. It look beautiful and we’ll cut it after it cools off. Thanks for sharing.