sesame no-knead bread

There was suddenly a lot of talk about baking bread around here and during the last couple of snowstorms we finally brought our talk to fruition. I should mention our impulse to get a loaf in the works was spurred by my sister’s arrival back from Australia with a few precious gifts: a jar of my father’s famous chutney (made with his homegrown tomatoes), my mothers blackberry jam (blackberries picked from the borders of her biodynamic garden), and some much requested fresh organic macadamia nut butter. I felt that all these delicacies that had traveled so far deserved to be eaten on really good, freshly baked bread.

So I dug around my recipe box and found this, my version of Mark Bittmans version of Jim Lahey’s “no-knead bread.”

A few years ago it seemed that everyone was making Jim Lehey’s recipe; I like it because he uses very little yeast, but I’m attracted to Mark Bittman’s version because it’s made with 100% whole grain flour.

Lehey uses only ¼ teaspoon of yeast and lets it ferment for up to 20 hours. Bittman uses 1 teaspoon of yeast and ferments it for 4 hours. I decided to meet half way with the yeast and fermentation time and used a combination of spelt, whole wheat, corn meal and sesame seeds. The bread came out moist and tangy with a nice toasty aroma from the sesame seeds.

fresh out of the oven

Sesame no-knead bread

2 cups whole spelt flour
½ cup whole wheat flour or rye flour
½ cup cornmeal
½ teaspoon yeast
1 ½ teaspoons sea salt
1 ½ cups warm water
¼ cup brown sesame seeds, plus more for sprinkling over the top
Extra virgin olive oil for oiling bread tin

In a medium size bowl combine spelt flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal, yeast and salt. Add water and mix until all combined, the dough will be a sticky, shaggy mess. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature (70 degrees) for 14 hours.

after 14 hours

Brush a small bread tin with the olive oil (I used a 5 inch by 9.5 inch tin, smaller would be fine too). Remove plastic (save it for covering bread again) and mix in sesame seeds. Shape dough into a rectangle and gently press into the bread tin. Brush top with olive oil and sprinkle with more sesame seeds.

Cover with reserved plastic wrap and let sit for another hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake bread for 45 to 55 minutes, if you have a thermometer, the internal temperature should be 210 degrees. Remove bread from pan and allow to cool for 20 minutes before slicing.

The perfect vehicle for rich macadamia butter and luscious black berry jam. Yum!

warm with blackberry jam and macadamia nut butter

The following day I tried Jim Lahey’s original recipe using whole wheat four, it didn’t turn out as well as the above bread, but fresh out of the oven with a good slathering of tangy sweet chutney and some local goat cheese from Anne Saxelby, it hit the spot.

Bill's chutney with "Battenkill" aged goat cheese

As kids we ate my father’s chutney with melted cheddar on rye bread, you will still find him enjoying it this way, flat white beside him while doing the crossword puzzle.

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This bread is lovely – subtly redolent of ripe pears, with a nice mix of spices and a pleasant nutty crunch from the pecans. It’s delicious plain and decadent toasted and spread with sweet butter or cream cheese. I used  Red Anjou pears but any ripe, flavorful pear will do.

As always, I encourage you to use the highest quality organic ingredients you can find/afford.

• Apple Bundt Cake
• Banana Bread
• Sweet Potato Biscuits
• Zucchini Bread

View full post on The Garden of Eating – a sinfully good blog about food

Now that the snow is melting, turning the city into a gritty wet mess, it’s time to pick the winner of the snowpocalypse bread baking challenge. There were about two dozen entries to the contest, posted on Flickr, with some amazing breads, many by first time bakers. It was hard to pick a winner (after all, I didn’t get to try the bread), but based on the pictures, I could tell which ones were great. 

What was I looking for? A loose crumb with nice bubbles cooked perfectly with a slightly dark crust, and just the feel of great home made bread. So without further delay, the winners are:

The gold medal to first-time baker Amanda at Metrocurean:

Amanda used the no-knead bread recipe (her slice of bread with butter is also pictured above). This was a very close call as the silver medal went to another newbie baker, Tom G. But Metocurean edged him out with her crust — it was darker, slightly carmelized, and the bread had a very airy look. But it was very close, similar to the 2/100’s of a second win in the downhill race at the Olympics. So here’s a tip for bakers — leave your breads in the oven a few minutes longer than you think is wise. The crust, with darkened bits, improves. 

Here’s the bread (above) by Tom G., which sprung up nicely.

The remaining breads get honorable mentions. The Irish Brown Bread took the bronze medal and would have won in the fruited bread category (if there were one).  Pictured below, it looks delicious and I gather the baker, with the screen name Governmentality, has been plowing his way through Jim Lahey’s book, My Bread.

This was a wonderful example of Challah as well, by Julie Sea, pictured below.

Finally, this no-knead bread by Caroline was superb, though I think it could have benefitted from a tad longer bake. 

The winner gets Jim Lahey’s book (courtesy of his publisher) so we can expect more great things from Amanda. But for all those who participated, keep baking. There is nothing that compares with home-made bread, where even the failures are edible (and if they are not, cut them into croutons and toast them in the oven.) 

- Samuel Fromartz.

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Here's an early entry from DC in the snowpocalypse bread baking challenge and I'd say it looks pretty tasty with a great crust. You still have until Tuesday to bake your bread and enter the contest! We've got a bunch more entries in the Flickr group here.

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By Samuel Fromartz

I was leaving the gym when I checked my messages. Alice Waters' office at Chez Panisse was calling — yeah, right. Who was this really? 

When I called back, it turned out Waters was calling and looking for a baker for her charity dinner in Washington, to replace one who had dropped out. Barton Seaver, a friend and chef at Blue Ridge,  suggested me. "We hear you make the best baguette in DC," said Sarah Weiner, Waters' assistant. "Well, yeah, I won a contest," I stammered, "but I just bake at home. The most I've baked was for Thanksgiving dinner." 

They needed to feed 40 — at a $500 a plate dinner at Bob Woodward's house. Could it be done in my home ovens? I said I'd call back. I went home to figure out how much bread I needed to bake and realized I could probably do it — 5 big loaves and several baguettes. I then called Peter Reinhart — the renowned baker and author I've known for a couple of years — to see what he thought. "That's not a lot of bread," he said, and he encouraged me to give it a whirl.

So began my first gig as a professional baker — at an Alice Waters' dinner.

I quickly settled on breads I made time and again and eat at home — a pain au levain made with sourdough and a mix of white, whole wheat and rye flours; a pane casareccio di Genzano, an airy white big loaf crusted with wheat bran that I picked up from Dan Leader's Local Breads; and of course, my baguettes. 

I've never baked this much bread before, so I worked out a timeline — and good thing too, since I would need to begin Friday to have the breads ready on Sunday. I started by feeding 50 grams (about a quarter-cup) of sourdough starter Friday morning, building it to 150 grams. On Friday night, I fed it again to take it up to 450 grams. Saturday morning, I refreshed it a third time. By Saturday evening, when I needed the ripe starter to make my doughs, I had over 1500 grams (3.3 pounds) of the stuff. With that steady feeding every 8-12 hours, the starter was bubbling, itching to impregnate the dough. It's pictured at left, and below, in the big bin on the right.

I measured out the flours and began mixing the dough. I don't really knead or use a mixer. Rather, I combine the ingredients by hand until they come together. Then I let the shaggy mass rest so the flour slowly soaks in the water, then fold it over every hour or so to develop the gluten. By the end of the process, the dough glistens with moisture. If you pull away a small piece and stretch it, you should be almost able to see through it — the so-called windowpane test that shows when a dough is done. This folding technique is a cousin to the no-knead method, since you just fold over the dough and let time do its work. It works beautifully, especially since my home mixer couldn't handle the volume of dough I made. 

Now the magic began — the first rise, the source of all flavor — and luckily it was a chilly night. Why was that important? Because I let my sourdoughs rise in an unheated basement storage room that is about 55F. That's the perfect temperature for a languid fermentation, when the sugars in the bread develop. Bakers buy proofing cabinets that cost thousands of dollars to get this temperature with refrigeration. My solution was less precise, but it worked fine. The genzano and baguette doughs rose in the refrigerator, since they contained instant yeast as well as sourdough and I wanted a slower fermentation.

At 7 the next morning, I took the pain au levain dough out and let it warm up for about an hour. I then shaped three boules, letting them rise for 2-1/2 hours. In the meantime, I heated up the baking stones in my double-oven. Then I repeated this with the Genzano loaf, about an hour later, and then the baguette. 

The rise went well, full of oven spring. I attribute that to the levain, which you'll recall had built over a 52-hour period with successive refreshments, including the last one in the dough. (Pictured below are the pane casareccio di Genzano – Genzano Country Bread).

I finished baking at about 2 p.m. and let the breads cool, then delivered the loaves for the dinner. Jean-Pierre Moullé, the chef at Chez Panisse, was there to greet me. We talked briefly about the breads and I mentioned I was a home baker, not a professional.

"I know, but you did not bake these at home," he said.

"Yes, I did," I countered — and I noticed his eyebrow rise a bit.

Later that evening, at a party preceding the dinner, Alice Waters took me aside, bread lover that she is, and thanked me warmly. It was a nice moment.

For a home baker, there's always the moment of anticipation when the bread comes out of the oven and you wait for it to cool before tearing into it. Alas, with these loaves, I didn't get a chance to cut into them, to evaluate the flavor and aromas or assess the interior crumb or the density of the crust — all crucial to a decent loaf. But I trust they were fine. 

The thing is, I don't bake for a living. There is no daily pressure, no waking at 1 a.m. to get to the ovens, no staff, no orders. It's just me and the bread. And until yesterday, I've only given my breads away to friends. Now I've donated them for a worthwhile cause. Maybe I've just widened the circle of people who eat my bread. And that's just fine.

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I’ve not tried Reinhart’s baking method (even though I once had one of his books out of the library), but I like this 2008 Ted talk on the alchemical symbolism of bread. If you’re either a baking or brewing geek like me it’s worth a view.

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