You're gonna bake bread. Old fashioned, full of gluten, honest to goodness WHITE bread. You rebel.
And in fact today I'm going to make more bread in it. Partly because the bread is really good and partly because it's just fun. Also I'm out of bread, and like any good mini-Martha instead of going to the store to buy bread, well of course I'm going to bake some myself in the cob oven I built.
I'm not sure when this happened to me but I have a hunch it's only going to get worse, culminating with me growing my own heart valve when I'm 80.
Table of Contents
Baking Bread in a Cob oven
Baking bread in a cob oven is FUN.
This was just a basic, white bread recipe that you can use in any oven, not just a cob oven.
It's originally from the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.
I'm back. Book has been ordered.
update: I've since ordered the book and use it every week. Always. I am never not making bread.
It's a no knead bread, but not the kind that's been making the rounds on the Internet over the past few years. That no knead bread is a very, very wet dough that has to be baked in some sort of pot or crock. I love that bread by the way and make a lot of it ... this just isn't that sort of no knead recipe. It's a wet dough, but manageable unlike the other no knead recipes.
No Knead White Bread
Ingredients
- 3 cups water luke warm
- 1 tablespoon yeast 1 packet
- 1.5 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
- 6.5 cups white flour unbleached, all-purpose white flour
- Cornmeal for pizza peel
Instructions
- Add 1 Tbsp. yeast to bowl along with 1-2 Tbsps kosher salt.. Add 3 cups warm water. Stir.
- Gradually add 6 1⁄2 cups flour.
- Stir the mixture until it's thickened and well combined. I use this Danish Whisk which is GREAT. Cover bowl with tea towel. Allow to rise for 2 hours.
- Once the dough has risen divide it into 3. Form each section into a ball and pull the 4 sides of the dough to the underneath. This is stretching out the gluten and aligning it. It gives you a nice tight top to the bread.
- Preheat oven to 450 f. You want it to heat for an hour prior to baking your bread.
- Leave the dough for its final proof on a very well floured proofing cloth (the floured, linen mat you see in my video) or tea towel for 45 minutes.
- After it's proofed, gently transfer to your peel or baking tray/stone. Cut several slashes across the top. This allows the bread to move upwards as opposed to sideways when it bakes.
- Bake until the interior temperature of the bread is 210 f. (around 25 minutes).
Notes
*You can also just use ⅓rd of the dough, and put the remaining dough in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.
*For an extra nice crust, bake the bread in a preheated dutch oven. Leave the lid on for the first 15 minutes of the bake and then remove it.
*Try removing 1 cup of the white flour and replacing it with Red Fife, Rye or another flour for a different flavour.
Nutrition
Consider this next fact a warning. If you make 3 loaves of bread, you will eat 3 loaves of bread. I did. No joke. I ate 3 loaves of bread in 3 days. By myself. I now have back fat. This is a serious warning and not even a joke. YOU WILL GET FAT if you make homemade bread. There's no way around it.
If you can deal with that, then bake away. If you can't you'd best stick to other baking. Like baked broccoli. Which taste especially good with a nice cheese sauce and a big ... slice ... of bread.
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I just finished my first homemade bread this summer - fall can't come fast enough as it's still 100F! I had some left that was getting tough so I cut into pieces and froze for croutons later. I gained 3 pounds but it was so worth it. I now knead to do another loaf or 3 so of course, I'm making yours today. The sun is good for rising! YUM for me tonight. (and of course. 3 more pounds.)
Just realized I've had some in the fridge for too long I think! ~ karen
(many years later, always late to the party...)
After some recent health issues, my doctor told me that I needed to radically change my diet: no sugar, no salt, no alcohol, no oils...and of course, no carbs (choose Paleo, Keto, or Mediterranean, she said). Which meant NO to 2 of my favorite things, taters and bread.
So after 2 weeks of diligently trying to stick with the program, I wanted to slap someone for a tortilla. So I said to myself "I'm making some heckin dambread." Dambread is what you make when you've been without for a long time and just want some...damn bread.
My recipe was akin to yours, but it wasn't pretty - I ended up making a couple of roll-y type things, and a few naan-y type things. But slathered in garlic butter they were all...damn good. I suspect it may continue like this for awhile: I try to be a "good girl" diet-wise, fall off the wagon horribly, make some Dambread, be happy, then start all over again. After all, the first word in diet is DIE, right? ;-)
May I please ask what kind of yeast you use. Is is active or Instant?
Thanks in advance.
Hi JJ. It's regular yeast, not instant. :) ~ karen!
OK, a few years late.
The question of origins of no-knead was.......... raised. While apparently it's been around in some form forever, in this incarnation it was developed by Jim Lahey and popularized by Mark Bittman (NY Times.)
in 2006.
I refer to Lahey as St Jim, as he put it out and others have picked it up and run with it, mostly not giving Lahey credit. Guess he doesn't mind.
I bake it and bring it to potlucks-- we have many, many, many--- I could not possibly keep it in the house. I often include a cup of raisins.
sometimes make it into foccia, including some cheese in the dough, some atop.
Oh that crust!!
I made this yesterday-baked the first loaf using the Dutch oven method-incredible! Today I baked the second loaf (my family demolished the first loaf in seconds) on my pizza stone with the water bath. Crust was perfect but I made a rookie mistake and put the dough in the oven cold so the middle didn’t bake. Still delicious and the family still demolished it.
I usually only make bread in the fall and winter (that's bread baking season, lol). I'll have to get a batch going! ~ karen
Hey I have the dough whisk and that book, now I know what to do with both...
Hi Karen:
Grammar guru here. 1 loaf of bread times 3 equals 3 loaves of bread. It tastes great, but ...