I've never been much of a baker, but I read the New York Times' article on baking bread in a Dutch oven, and I had to try it (basic recipe here; the original article now costs money to view, but you can see an addendum). This bread recipe has been something of a sensation, getting a busy Flickr group, and widespread discussion on many foodie blogs (Google searches for no-knead bread, Bittman bread, Lahey bread, and/or new york times bread seem to turn up a good number of hits).

For my first attempt, last weekend, I concluded that our old aluminum Dutch oven wasn't really up to the task, so I bought a basic cast iron model ($50) and seasoned it by cooking some bacon (mmmm... bacon). I baked a wheat loaf (2x wheat flour to 1x AP white flour). I didn't get enough of a rise, probably because I used cold water from the tap, although the resulting bread was pretty much everything I could have ask for. Excellent, chewy, crusty stuff.

Valuable lessons: (1) Take the pot completely out of the oven before inserting the dough, such that you only need to drop the dough into the pot. It's exceptionally difficult to throw a sticky dough. Mine landed half in and half out of the pot, requiring some quick maneuvering to get it all together without burning myself. (2) Use liberal amounts of flour to prevent adhesion between the dough and anything else. Just cover the dough ball in flour. Rather than using tea towels, I used wax paper. Much easier to clean up. (3) As discussed in the addendum, linked above, start your dough with "tepid" (i.e., slightly above room temperature) water, rather than straight cold from the tap.

This time around, I decided to try a rye loaf (20% rye flour, 80% AP white flour, plus some caraway / sisal seeds), and I decided to do everything by weight rather than volume. I've been reading up on bread-baking as well, and they tend to refer to the percentage of water by comparing mass. So, I used 500g of flour and 400g of water, thus yielding an "80% water" bread. This is the same percentage as in the NYT recipe, but a 16% increase in volume.

The results?



Beautiful loaf. Amazing crust, but a bit on the soggy side, inside. It seems that by increasing the volume of the loaf by some 16%, I should have made a similar correction in the cooking time, which I didn't do. Next time, I'll try elongating the baking time, or sticking with the original weights as per the recipe.

Anyone else tried this? The results certainly impressed my parents, who were in town to see their granddaughter...