Such a great concept. Mix up enough dough for four loaves or so of bread (we make the larger sandwich loaves so we get maybe three from a batch), let it rise for a couple hours, throw it in the fridge & then whenever you want a fresh loaf of bread cut of what you need, shape it, let it rise a bit & bake it. Seriously easy & seriously fast. My sister mentioned she'd love to have some homemade bread so Saturday morning when we got up at 8 I cut off the dough for it & before we left for her house at noon I had a loaf cooling ready to go to her. I was a big fan of the No Knead Bread but this I feel is even easier. I know some reviews on Amazon say this isn't real European bread & you have to knead bread for it to be "real" but homemade bread that's quick, easy & tastes great, I guess I like this "fake" stuff.
So far I mainly done the master recipe which they suggest you should, well, master before trying the variations. We've been baking it in a loaf pan as I said for what they call the Crusty White Sandwich Bread.
You get a really nice crust, thanks to cooking it with a little steam & a soft lovely crumb. So good we've stopped buying sandwich bread at the store & I just make a loaf whenever we need it. Since the store bread we like costs over $3.00 a loaf & this costs something like 10 - 15 cents to make the saving are great too.
This week I tried a slightly different variation. We had purchased some Red River cereal which is basically cracked wheat, rye & fax seed as an alternative to oatmeal.
It was really bland as a hot cereal so Matt suggested trying it in bread. I put a half cup of the cereal into the master recipe & cut the flour down by about 1/4 of a cup.
It added a nice extra crunch to the bread & the rye & flax added some wonderful extra flavor.
I just sent my Dad a copy of the book as he has been making No Knead Bread like there is no tomorrow so I'm interested to hear how this method works for him
I haven't tried anything from this book yet, but I've looked through it a ton!! I think I'm going to do some tomorrow...
ReplyDeleteI love the addition of the cereal - that looks fabulous!
Hi Kat,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for trying the bread. Your pictures are fantastic!
As you work through the book you should visit our websites to down load the errata sheet. As hard as we tried to find all the mistakes we missed a few!
www.zoebakes.com
www.artisanbreadinfive.com
Thank you for sharing this with all your readers. Enjoy the bread!
Zoë
Okay, you've sold me. I'm buyin' the book and makin' the bread. I'll report back. For several years, I made sourdough bread every weekend, but I got tired of it after awhile, and I haven't made bread much since then. Looking forward to trying this.
ReplyDeleteI've recently purchased the book but haven't tried it yet. Definitely need to open it up and start baking!
ReplyDeleteFor many, many years I have baked bread the "old fashioned" way by kneading the heck out of it. Time and the "stretch and fold" method really do produce a much superior loaf.