It’s been around for a while, but I first read about Jim Lahey’s ‘no knead bread‘ in a Saveur magazine when I was in New York last year. I’d already got the bread baking bug, and the idea of a loaf that required no kneading seemed a bit odd, even a bit sacrilegious. I did a bit of research on line, and found out that everyone raves about the loaf, and it basically put Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery on the map.

Anyway, it definitely got me interested. How could a loaf requiring so little work be so good? Life just isn’t like that. So I gave it a go. The loaf is cooked in a cast iron pot, a bit like an Australian damper, so you’ll need a Le Creuset or something similar for it to work.

Ingredients

3 cups (430g) flour
1½ cups (345g or 12oz) water
¼ teaspoon (1g) yeast
1¼ teaspoon (8g) salt
Olive oil
Rye flour (for dusting)

Method

Mix all of the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together for a minute or so to form a ’shaggy’ dough. Transfer the dough to a larger bowl oiled with some olive oil. NB. the dough will expand to around 4 times the size, so make sure your bowl is big enough. Cover with clingfilm and let the dough develop for 12-18 hours at room temperature.

After this time the dough will be aerated. Remove it from the bowl and fold on itself once or twice. The dough is stickier than with regular bread, a bit like when making a sourdough, so be prepared to get a bit messy. Using dough scrapers is a good idea. Let the dough rest 15 minutes in the bowl or on the work surface, then try and shape into a ball. Generously coat a tea towel with rye flour, place the dough on the left hand side, scatter the dough with more flour, and then fold the towel over the top to cover it. Let rise for around 2 hours at room temperature, until more than doubled in size.

Preheat your oven to 230°C. Place a cast iron pot in it at least 30 minutes prior to baking to preheat. Once the dough has more than doubled in volume, remove the pot from the oven and put the dough in it. Shake from side to side so it fills the base. Cover with the lid and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake for another 20 minutes or so uncovered, until the loaf is nicely browned. Take the loaf out and place on a wire rack to cool. I know this is going to sound a bit sad, but the loaf’s crust crackles as it cools, which is pretty exciting.

When you cut into the loaf, you won’t be disappointed. The crust is crisp, crunchy and satisfying, and the dough inside a cross between really good French bread and a Ciabatta. Honestly, its great. And for so little work. There is such a thing as a free lunch.

Two final notes. I cooked mine in an oval 27 cm pot, but think it would have worked better in the round 24 cm version. Secondly, I tried this recipe again at the weekend substituting the strong white flour with a ‘Farine Bise‘ that I bought in Paris, but it was much less successful. The crust was less impressive, and the dough much heavier. I guess it rises better with the plain white.

UPDATE: Tried the loaf again at the weekend in a smaller pot, with great results. Check out photos on my Flickr page here.

Then I came across ‘River Cottage Bread’; a small but sensible handbook on the subject, which has basically become my bread bible. The book contains lots of recipes for breads from standard loaves, to ciabatta, naan and beyond, which are great, but for me the most interesting part of the book is the more practical stuff.

From my limited experience, it seems to me that once you’ve got the basics of making dough down, you can freestyle to a certain extent. But the stuff that is more rigid, and vital to creating consistently good bread, are the techniques and tips, and thats why this  book has become so invaluable.

For example, the book explains that you need to try and re-create the conditions of a bakers bread oven as closely as possible in your own home. It recommends that as well as having your oven as high as possible for the initial baking process, that you should also have a tray of boiling water in the oven to generate steam, as this creates optimum conditions for the bread to rise. This is the sort of stuff that you don’t discover by trial error, and kind of need to know. As you might expect, there’s also lots of practical advice on rising, proving, how to prepare your dough properly for the oven and so on.

The other great thing about the book is that it has kept me motivated to keep baking. It’s honest with you, and manages your expectations. You’re not going to produce a Poilane loaf on your first attempt. Like most things in life, baking bread takes practice, but if you stick at it your results improve quickly. I’ve created a bit of a visual document of my progress over on my Flickr account.

If you want to get a copy, you can get one from River Cottage or Amazon here.

For the past couple of years my mate Ollie has been organising a hog roast, and last weekend was what has now been dubbed as ‘Hogfest 09′.

It’s basically a gathering for friends and family at his folk’s place in Shropshire, culminating in a hog roast. I know it all sounds a bit ‘River Cottage’, but for me escaping London and getting primal with a whole pig, a big fire and bunch of booze is my idea of a good weekend.  Ollie usually lives in Cairo where this kind of pork based entertaining doesn’t go down too well, so for him I think it’s also rare opportunity to feast on pork with impunity.

The preparation process is relatively simple. The pig gets scored all over with a Stanley Knife, given a good rub down with olive oil, and then sprinkled liberally with salt and pepper. No herbs or any other ‘fancy stuff’.

Cooking is a bit more complicated. The fire gets started at 5am, and then at 6 a barbecue pit of sorts is created using 2 sheets of corrugated iron, and by spreading the fire out into a hollow rectangular shape. The hog then gets mounted on a spit (bought on ebay and imported from the States no less)  and turned a quarter rotation every 5-10 minutes.

The fire’s heat should be more intense at the start to get the skin nice and crisp, this is pretty obvious when it happens, and then the rest of the cooking is slow and methodical. I think our pig was about 70 kilos and took around 12 hours to cook.

By 7pm (after a good half an hour resting) the meat was perfectly roasted. I had the honour of carving the beast, but after seeing it cook for so long my meat lust kind of took over and I went at it a bit like a demented cavemen butcher. It tasted amazing. Lovely salty crackling on top, sweet,  smokey, tender meat underneath. Totally worth the time and effort.

There are some more pictures of the lucky pig and the rest of the day here, and if you fancy doing it yourself there’s some ‘How To’ help here.