Recipes for No Knead and Other Tasty Breads
(Page 2 of 3)
October/November 2007
Jaime Netzer
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Onion Beer Bread
For onion lovers! This scrumptious recipe from The Flavorful
Seasons Cookbook is easy for anyone.
3 cups self-rising flour
1 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
10 ounces room-temperature light beer
2 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup onion, minced
Nonstick cooking spray
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine all ingredients. Pour into
a lightly sprayed 9-inch loaf pan and bake for about 50 minutes, or
until a toothpick comes out clean.
For those without a bread machine or a strong set of hands,
there is another option: don't knead the dough at all. That's
right; it's possible to bake bread without any palm work
whatsoever. The
New
York Times posted the following recipe, which actually yielded
an edible loaf of bread for this novice baker. Check out the
December 2007/January 2008 issue of
Mother Earth News for
much more on this No Knead bread technique. I recently tried this
technique for myself and have included my tips and mishaps in
bold.
No Knead Bread
Time: About 1? hours plus
14 to 20 hours' rising
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1? tsp. salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed for dusting (At my
mother's suggestion, I ditched both and just used extra
flour.)
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups
water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky.
(The dough will not just be sticky, it will be incredibly
gummy.) Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at
least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature,
about 70 degrees. (I let my dough rise for a full 18 hours
resting on and/or close to a heating pad set on low, to combat the
chilly air that had moved in the weekend I chose for my
adventure.)
2. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle
it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or
twice. (I could not, and did not, 'fold' the dough. It was
so sticky that the best I could do was attempt to turn it over.
Luckily, my 'loaf' still rose as it should have.) Cover
loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work
surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a
ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour,
wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust
with more flour. (Again, I basically failed at this step.
Even though I avoided terry cloth, the towel I choose was still
porous enough that my dough completely cemented itself into it's
grooves, and I could not keep my hands coated with enough flour to
shape the dough into anything, as it was clinging to my
fingers.) Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for
about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in
size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
(Luckily, my dough still did this, though it was a huge
amorphous blob, not a neat ball with a seam.)
