Home made bread

Friday a week ago, when we first got to town, we hit Lulu's bread and bagels for a lunch. It was their last day in the old location, and over the long weekend they had moved to a new location across the road. We plan on going there to eat breakfast each weekend we're in town, like before, as well as bread. But due to their closure over the long weekend, we ran out of bread. I used the opportunity to try the bread recipe for the no-knead beautiful-crust bread published by NYTimes' The Minimalist. It came out great. Good bread, though I will have figure out better recipe than half-white half-whole wheat that I used. May be include sunflower seeds like the Hearthside bakery used to do. Overall, the bread came out excellent. Minimum work required, best crust I have ever managed at home. The original recipe is described in this article, the recipe itself is here, and a video showing how it's done is here.

In short: make a regular bread dough with 3 cups of flour, using perhaps half the yeast you would normally, and increasing the water to make for a dough that is more liquidy than normal. Let it rise for half a day or a day, then fold it on itself and let it rise a couple more hours. Preheat oven, with a lidded dutch oven inside it, to 500 degrees. When the dutch oven is hot, slide the bread dough into it, close the lid, bake for half an hour, then uncover the lid and bake 15 minutes more.

Excellent!