ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

This is a guest post by Irina Just.

Readers of Jim’s blog are fully aware that we’ve been planning to build an outdoor brick bread and pizza oven because we simply couldn’t get any home-made bread to come out the way we like it: chewy, stretchy on the inside and very crusty on the outside.

And of course, it wasn’t available in any store here, in our area. The closest we ever came was the La Brea sourdough baguette which we used to buy by the dozen, frozen, from our Lebanon Roth’s grocery store and bake as needed. When Roth’s closed its Lebanon store, there went that source.

I experimented with any and all recipes I could find, collected from friends, the Internet and my old recipe files. I sprayed the oven to create steam, I worked quickly, I kneaded diligently – and it seemed that I worked with a new recipe every week, either with or without my sourdough starter. Not a single one was satisfactory. The breads were good, but they didn’t have the texture I wanted to achieve.

My last resort was an outdoor brick bread oven, fired with wood, to be used once a week for pizza, bread, and chicken (in that order = the order of available heat).

Then one evening we were at our friends Linda and Robert’s house in Scio for dinner. Linda fixed coq au vin. We brought bread and our own wine to contribute, Robert shared his wine. The conversation centered around food and focused on bread. When I was done lamenting my unsatisfactory loaves, Linda asked, “Why not try no-knead bread? It’s easy, and results in a bread that sounds just what you’re looking for.” Now why I hadn’t heard about no-knead bread before? The very next day I dove in – and ended up baking myself right out of a bread oven.

It is an amazing, and amazingly simple recipe. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment, elaborate preparations or muscle power. All you do is mix in a bowl3 cups flour with ¼ tsp instant yeast, 2 tsp salt and 1 5/8 cup lukewarm water, using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm place (warm room temperature, out of any draft) somewhere between 14-20 hours. I place mine on a shelf above our woodstove.

The dough then looks pretty spongy and wet.

Coat your fingers with flour, lift the dough on a floured surface and fold over twice. Cover with plastic, let sit for 15 minutes, and then shape the dough into a ball, using enough flour on your hands to handle the still very sticky dough. Put the ball on the kitchen counter or a cutting board, seam down; sprinkle with more flour, cover loosely with plastic and then with a towel, and let sit on the kitchen counter for up to 2 hours.

During the last 30 minutes start the oven by preheating it to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and put a Dutch oven or any baking dish with a lid inside the oven, so the dish can get hot also. When the oven and the dish are heated, take your dough and place it inside the dish.

Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid.and bake your bread for another 20-30 minutes. Take the bread out of the oven and take or turn it out of the pan to cool a bit (if you can wait!).

THAT’S IT!

Try not to eat the whole loaf all at once (I put on a whole pound after the first 2 loaves). It is very crusty outside, perfectly chewy inside and has those big holes that we all identify with “hearth, artisan” bread.

If you can get bread like this out of an ordinary kitchen oven that can be fired up every day with the turn of a knob, why go through the expense and effort of building a specialized bread oven that, because of the cost and effort of heating with a wood fire, you’d probably only use a couple times a week at most?

If your dish is round, your loaf will be (somewhat) roundish (free style); using an oblong dish will obviously change the shape. I’ve been searching for more shapes with lids, since the lid is the secret to the dish creating its own steam oven.  I have found one great website – www.breadtopia.com, headquartered in Iowa. They carry a round and an oblong clay baker, called La Cloche, a version of the German popular Römertopf. I ordered the oblong clay baker as the round one is on back order right now.

In my e-mail I had asked about the lead-time for that and Eric, the owner of Breadtopia, called me on the phone within minutes of my query and answered my questions personally.  And I got email confirmation that my order had shipped, the very same day. I’m so impressed with this outstanding customer service that I want to spread the word.

Meanwhile, I’ve been experimenting with different types and various ratios of flour:

1. All 3 cups bread flour (King Arthur is the best, I think).
2. 1 ½ cups bread flour – 1 ½ cup hard white winter wheat ground myself with my flour mill, from a friends’ farm just outside Albany.
3. 2 cups of my own milled flour and 1 cup bread flour.
4. And even all 3 cups of my own milled flour.

The results were all good, but the No. 2 version of equal amounts of bread flour and my own milled flour were the best – chewy inside, hard crusty outside, a bit heavier (because of the whole wheat) but not too dense. Next I will experiment with using my sourdough starter as a portion of the dough. Lessen the amount of water to achieve the same texture should theoretically work. Stay tuned!