Saturday, August 1, 2009

The Clams Bake!

This Clam has never been much of a baker. I'm not sure if I can really explain it, but my culinary preferences tend to lean more toward the cooking side. However, we Clams do love good bread, and we also love dutch ovens (cast-iron in particular). So when OCF (Original Clam Friend) Maureen discovered a phenomenal recipe for a simple, dutch oven bread, I figured that my time had come.

The recipe comes courtesy of Mark Bittman's NY Times Dining column The Minimalist. I love his column, but this recipe came out of the archives - from 2006. I don't know how Maureen came across it. Say Maureen, how did you come across it? Anyway, I realize that everyone who's interested in baking may have already seen this recipe, but if you haven't, the recipe is great and the accompanying article is pretty fascinating as well. It's called No-Knead Bread. Here's the link.

So here's my brief recounting of the baking process. I was determined to time things so that I could bake this bread in time for Saturday brunch, so I started the dough around 4:30 on Friday afternoon. Starting this was possibly the easiest thing I've ever done in the kitchen. The process: combine flour, salt, yeast in bowl, add water, stir briefly, cover. And then leave it alone for 18 hours.

When 8:30 rolled around the next morning, following the recipe simply required me to turn the risen dough out onto a floured work surface, sprinkle it with flour, fold it twice, move it to a towel, and allow it to rise for two more hours. After that I heated the oven to 450 with the empty dutch oven inside. After everything was at full temperature, the dough went into the hot dutch oven, and then baked 30 minutes covered and about another 15 uncovered.

As is explained in the Times article, the dutch oven provides something that's fairly elusive in home bread baking - moisture retention. Apparently the loaf sort of steams in the dutch oven as it bakes. And I will say, the resulting loaf completely lived up to the hype. Great crumb and crust, as the bakers say. I'm still impressed that such an artisan bread creation took shape in my oven. I'll be putting this baking method into my regular rotation, and I can't wait to experiment with different things in the dough, such as whole wheat flour.

So, you know what to do now. Get your cast iron out. IMMEDIATELY.

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ALSO - The Clams are playing tomorrow night at Ronny's in Chicago! We'll be sharing the bill with our good friend Bill Tucker, Nathan Kalish and The Wildfire (from Grand Rapids, featuring our old friend Julio Gomez on guitar), and Shape Note.

Here's a flyer thingy:
POST COMPLETED!

1 comment:

  1. listen, this recipe is all over the food blogs. which i read. often.

    glad you like it!

    ReplyDelete