NYT No-knead bread

This no-knead bread was all the rage a while ago, and I'd made it once and it was good. So, I made it again. Its pretty easy, because you don't have to do anything except mix things together and let it sit, but you need the dutch oven to cook it in - I suppose a casserole dish with a heavy lid would work too, but the dutch oven was pretty great.

The original recipe is from the NYT, and its worth trying if you like bread that is chewy on the inside, crunchy and crusty on the outside, and has big holes in it. I'm all about the big holes. But that's hard to do with regular bread, for whatever reason, getting those big holes seems to take lots of experimenting and different attempts and tiny things make big differences - well, this one was easy.

Mix together 1/4tsp active yeast (I didn't have instant) with 1-5/8C warm water and 1 tsp sugar. Let the yeast get started, it won't do much since its a tiny amount of it, and then add 3C of flour with 1-1/4tsp salt. Mix that all together and then just leave it in its mixing bowl for 12-18 hours, covered with plastic wrap.


After about 12 hours, it'll look like this - big holes on the top. Supposedly that means that its ready.


Flour your hands, and then in the bowl, knead the dough a couple times until its all deflated. No need to overdo it. Replace the plastic wrap and let it sit for another 1.5 hours.
(after knocking it down, before the second rise).

In the last half hour that its rising, preheat the oven to 450F, and put the dutch oven into the oven to warm up with the oven. The dough should have about doubled in bulk by this point, and once your oven is preheated, transfer the dough carefully to the hot dutch oven. I put down some cornmeal first, so it wouldn't stick. Put the dutch oven back into the oven, with the lid, for 30 minutes. After 30min, take off the lid, and cook for another 15min, to get that golden crust. Take it out, turn it onto a cooling rack, and cool enough so that it doesn't burn you when you dig into it.

The holes!