by A.J. Coltrane
I’m always looking around at how everyone is making Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread. One day I ran across a blog post where the writer recommended *not* preheating the cooking pot. Her method was to place the the dough on parchment and let it rise in the pot prior to baking. I had to try it out — if it worked then it wouldn’t be necessary to transfer the dough from a towel into a smoking hot pot. The approach would be neater, cleaner, and easier.
The two breads below use the same formula, one of the two didn’t use a preheated pot:
One bread is significantly lighter, isn’t it? The darker crust was preheated, and it had a better crust that was more highly regarded by the crowd.
The Lahey recipe calls for a 4.5-5 quart heavy pot. I don’t own that size – yet.
The larger of the two is 7.25 quarts (#28). The smaller is 2.75 quarts (#23).
The lighter bread used the smaller container. The darker bread used the larger one. I mention this because it might be possible that the difference in pots changed the color of the crust, though I doubt it. I do think the difference changed the finished shape. (Related note: From what I’ve read, smaller pots create a higher rise.)
So… In my opinion, the “no preheating” thing doesn’t work as well.
One change from the recipe that I think works is this: I let the final rise happen in a bowl instead of on a towel. I put about 1 teaspoon of olive oil into the bowl and spread it around the entire interior with a paper towel. I then dust the interior of the bowl lightly with flour. The flour prevents most of the interaction between the oil and dough, which keeps the oil from tendering the crust.
I use a bowl that is slighter smaller in diameter than the final pot. I’ve tried it with just flour in the bowl, or just oil towards the bottom of the bowl, and in my experience the dough will stick somewhat to the sides and/or bottom when I attempt it one of those ways. Using both flour and oil, the dough plops right out:
No dough is stuck to the bowl! That’s my $.02 “improvement”.
FlatbreadGarden 