Making Your Own Bread is Kneadless

I've been making bread lately using a modified method of the Jim Lahey No-Knead recipe. Lahey makes a round loaf in a pot which is covered for half of the cooking time to produce a shattery crust. I don't do that. My method is even lazier and I make it in a loaf pan so I have a more uniform slice for the toaster.

Here's the Lahey recipe I use:

3 cups flour (all purpose or bread flour)
1 1/4 teaspoon or so salt
1/2 teaspoon of dry yeast
1 5/8 cup of lukewarm water

That's it.

I mix the dry ingredients in a large plastic salad bowl then add the water and stir together until pretty well mixed. It will be a wet and shaggy dough and you might have a little unincorporated flour but it will all even out in the rise. Cover it in the bowl and let sit out of drafts in a room temperature quiet place for 12 to 18 hours. You want it double at least in volume and it will look lumpy and spongy and bubbly on top.

After the first rise, grease or spray with cooking spray the inside of your loaf pan. Put your bowl of bread and your pre-greased loaf pan next to each other on your work surface. Uncover your dough and lightly dust the top with flour. I use a wire strainer for this to get a more even and lighter dusting of flour. Now I tip the bowl toward me and scrap and roll the dough from the backside of the bowl toward me until I can dust half of the newly exposed bottom side of the dough. Then I turn the bowl around 180 degrees, tip, scrap, roll, and dust the other half of the bottom of the dough. You should now have your dough still in the same bowl and dusted with flour on all sides. Now punch the dough down flat in the bowl, dusting with more flour if needed. Roll up your flattened dough into a loaf the approximate length of your pan and quickly lift it out of the bowl and place it seam side down into your greased loaf pan. The dough will be floppy and stretchy so just do your best but quickly. Once in the pan go ahead and punch it down and out in the pan until it fills the pan and the top lays fairly flat and even. Spray or grease the top of the loaf and cover loosely with a piece of greased or sprayed cling wrap and let rise for a second time for about another 3 to 4 hours.

I've found that when the second rise is risen about 3/4 inch above the top of the pan it is ready. Any more second rising results in the bread drooping down over the sides of the loaf pan and does not make a convenient loaf for toastering. When the second rise is ready I prepare the oven by putting an oven rack where it will put the top of the loaf pan I will bake the bread in at the middle of the height of the oven. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees. Carefully peel off the cling wrap and bake for 30 minutes or until the loaf sounds hollow when thumped. Turn loaf out onto a cooling rack.* Done.

This sounds like a lot more trouble then it is. We are talking about 5 minutes or so of actual effort. I make the dough in a couple of minutes around 6 am, it sits all day. When I get home around 6 pm, I spend a couple of minutes punching and panning and it sits all evening. During "Daily Show" I pre-heat and bake. During "Colbert Report" I de-pan. In the morning it has sat and cooled uncovered all night and I turn it upside down, slice up with an electric knife, and toss it in the toaster.

This is a sort of rustic bread with a coarse grain and a crispy-chewy crust. When toasted that chewy crust becomes super crunchy. I like color on my toast and with our cheap little toaster I have to toast it twice on the toaster's highest setting. Your mileage may vary.

If you want faster lazy bread, I have upped the yeast to a tablespoon and been able to get both rises and the baking done in an evening with no loss of quality. This bread is bullet proof so don't worry about taking liberties.

* Heads up: Don't set a hot pyrex pan on a ceramic/glass cook top, especially if cooktop is damp or wet.

Flap Jacques Part Duex: Electric Boogaloo

Well, we had another go.

In my try, I dried the panckaes overnight and then I docked them in the morning and soaked them in the custard mixture until they barely held together. The outside did not crisp and the inside was more soggy then custardy.

Mar took a turn. She did not dry out the pancake and soaked them less before griddling. She had made a custard without any sugar but I convinced her adding sugar to the custard would be a good thing. I was wrong. For some reason that sugar caused burning instead of browning but it did achieve a great crisp and the middle was moist but not soggy.

Over the weekend we will try something in the middle of the two attempts and hopefully hit the sweet spot.

Flap Jacques

Working on a French Pancake recipe: pancake used as the toast in French Toast. Made one batch with moderate success, try again this weekend.

Thanks to Martha for the name. Runner up: Pain-cake perdu.

The FamSam

My family on my mother's side, back at least to my Grandparents, have eaten a sandwich of sliced tomatoes between two slices of white bread, one spread with peanut butter and the other with mayonaisse or Miracle Whip [preferred] . That is the classic version. I know it sounds gross. It does not taste gross. It tastes savory, salty, sweet, acid, tangy, fresh. Especially this time of year with ripe tomatoes.

There apparently have always been tweaks to the sandwich according to personal taste. For instance, my Mother adds a sprinkling of sugar to her tomatoes. Aside: she also puts sugar on the radishes of her radish sandwich but I digress. I on the other hand sometimes toast the bread. Wild and crazy, right? Lately, I been thinking that bacon would be a good addition. Meanwhile, to be a more responsible blogster I called my Mom to get some history [if any] behind how this sandwich came into the family. Apparently it just had always been a sandwich her family made. I had never thought much about it but she said it was a poor man's BLT. Exclesior! Let there be bacon...

...and there was bacon and Cam saw that it was good.

That is toasted farmer's market white bread, garden tomatoes with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, Miracle Whip [still preferred], good ol' Jiffy Peanut Butter and Wright's bacon. So I suppose the next logical step is the addition of Lettuce to round out the B and T. I guess I'll try that next he said lukewarmly.

*Moody interlude shot through a rain streaked window as Cam reflects on his lost youth*

 
The bacon does amp up the savory and salty and adds crunch. I'm sure lettuce will amp up the sweet and fresh and crisp. That is good, right?  Good, better even, but maybe not in the spirit of the original. The Classic of my youth with it's garden tomatoes between Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip and Skippy Peanut Butter is still my sentimental favorite sandwich.

I am curious if anyone else is familiar with this sandwich.

My first "English" breakfast

OK, don't know how to rotate a photo in blogger yet but you get the idea.

Above is said first English breakfast. We stopped at the Rendezvous our first morning in London on our way to Buckingham Palace. There's something I never thought I'd say.

Nice not fancy place. Diner-like, filled with business types and street workers and regulars and an American sign painter and his family.

The first surprise, the toast was cold and unbuttered. All of the toast we encountered in England was cold and unbuttered and usually served in a toast rack [to speed chilling presumably].

Second surprise, the bacon promised on the menu turns out to be ham. Not a "Canadian Bacon" ham but what we Americans call ham. They are both cured, I get it.

Third surprise, On the English Breakfasts we had the beans seemed to be Heinz Pork and Beans straight out of the can. I guess it was unrealistic to expect some slow rustic peasant beans from a peat fired hearth straight out of  a cast iron dutch oven. 

Pleasant surprise, grilled tomato.

Another oddly pleasant surprise, the sausage. A standard mild sausage with a casing but had what tasted like a corn meal filler. In the States I would see that filler as the hallmark of an adulterated sausage but it gave this sausage a corn doggie flavor which appealled to my low class tastebuds. I preferred it to the better, locally sourced, internal organ-y sausage we had with later breakfasts. 

A mild disappointment, the coffee. It arrived with a gorgeous crema

but it, and almost all of the coffee I had in England, seemed....not bad.....but...bland I guess. We did later get, what I considered, a good cup at our hotel in Bournemouth, brewed by the bed-and-breakfast-hotel manager/short-order-breakfast chef.

Anyways, after reading this it sounds sort of all Ugly American of me: everbody else's everything is inferior but that's not what I'm saying. I very much liked the "English Breakfast". When we got home I did my own homage: farmer's market egg, hot and buttered farmer's market cracked wheat bread, Eight O'Clock Columbian coffee, Wright's Hickory Smoked Bacon [not ham], Jimmy Dean's patty sausage, and Bush's Country Style Beans [with a little sage].

Blah, blah, blah...

Hi.

First: Exposition.

I've sarcastically talked for a long time about starting a blog of stuff I eat . Here it is.

Second: Explanation.

I had wanted to call the blog "Foodcation" with a premise of stuff I've eaten while on vacation or daytrips. Someone had already thought of that title. So my daughters volunteered to help me get started and suggested "Foodication" as an alternative. I liked it. Slightly suggestive [in my mind], and not limited to only vacation. As it turns out, they were actually saying "Foodiecation". I'm not a foodie and I don't take many vacations, so it is slightly misleading. I do like food and we do take daytrips. So......

I was so grateful that my daughters cared enough to get involved, and it didn't show in Blogger as previously in use either, and I'm too lazy to change it, so it stays.

Third: Long story short.

A blog about food I have eaten at a destination which could include my home.

Fourth: Question.

Who cares? Maybe only me.