Breaking bread

The first phase of my bread campaign is coming to a close. It's taken a couple of months, but I can now say with confidence, and a flagrant lack of modesty, that most days I bake bread for which I'd happily pay money (and I'm fussy).  It's a small enough achievement, given what some of my contemporaries tackle on a daily basis. At 53, I am only too aware that the people running governments, armies, banks and major theatre companies are about my age, and getting younger. But distorted perspective aside, here is a drum roll for the loaf.

I'm using a bread recipe which belongs to Jim Lahey who has a bakery in Sullivan St, New York. A few years ago his "no-knead" method was written up by Mark Bittman, a columnist for the NY Times. Check it out on Google and you'll see how the spark ignited by this one article The Minimalist quickly spread into a foodie blaze. As every celebrity chef  must,  Lahey went on to produce a lavish book, which I found by chance (ok, I was in a bookshop, looking for inspiration in the cookbook section).  The book doesn't give you much more than the recipe popularised by the NY Times article but I do like a pretty picture. The one above comes from my own kitchen, and I like to think it compares favorably those in My Bread.

Lahey's method is ridiculously simple. It relies on a few basic ingredients, and one of them can't be bought - time. We'll have stacks of that on the boat. Briefly, you start making the bread the day before you want to eat it. The key to the great taste of this bread is in its long fermentation. I do as Lahey says, and allow 18 hours for its first rise. It's because the yeast has so long to work its magic that you don't need to bother with kneading the gluten into action. The second rise is much shorter, a regular one to two hours. Add the baking time of 45 minutes, then an hour to cool, and all up you're looking at 24 hours to bake a loaf of bread. I've got into a rhythm of mixing up the dough mid-afternoon, which means I can shape it for a second rise when I get up in the morning, and have it in the oven by, say, 9 am. By lunch time, the bread has cooled sufficiently to slice.

Aside from time, and strong flour (about which more some other time), you need an ovenproof pot with a lid - cast-iron is good, so is Pyrex.  The pot works as a kind of Dutch oven. It sounds odd, but in fact it's a seriously brilliant idea. The steam produced by the bread as it cooks is trapped within the pot and creates a moist heat. The bread's crust doesn't dry out, and the crumb (the technical name for the inside of the loaf) cooks chewy and light. I worked down from my biggest Le Creuset pot which we bought to feed an army (as used to be the norm around here) to my smallest one, 20 cm across.  I was ecstatic when I realised that the small pot , which fits into the boat galley oven, produced as excellent a loaf as the larger pot size recommended by Lahey.  Last week I talked myself into buying an Emile Henry ceramic pot (Lahey's favourite), and though I would say this, wouldn't I, it's got an edge over the cast iron. Ah. The simple delights of a simple life. How well will the bread fare in the unquantifiable heat of the tiny galley oven? Think on it. The British election woes will be solved, the euro crisis contained, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill burned out, but there will always be another loaf of  bread to bake.






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