The Best Bread I've Ever Made

For dinner last night, I was making a new pasta dish (yummy) from a recipe our friend Scott gave us. When he gave us the recipe, he said to serve it with a great bread. For a long time, I've been wanting to make the No-Knead Bread that's been so popular on the internet and TV food shows. It's a type of sourdough bread that doesn't require any kneading--just about 24 hours to make it. Yes, I said 24 hours.

You start the bread the day before you want to eat it by simply mixing flour, water, salt, and a little tiny bit of yeast in a bowl and then letting it sit until the next day.

Here's what mine looked like after about 18 hours. It rises and then forms lots of little bubbles on the surface. (And smelled slightly sour.)


For the next step, you just dump the dough/batter on the counter and, using just a little flour, form it into a ball-kind of shape. You sprinkle it with cornmeal or wheat bran, cover it with a towel and let it sit for another 2 hours.



Then you just dump the ball into a preheated dutch oven, cover it, and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for another 15 minutes. This is what it looked like in the dutch oven.



Here's the final results. This picture doesn't do it justice--it was gorgeous and big!!! I was so happy with it.

Here's how the interior looked. The outside was very crusty and crackly and the inside had a great texture. It was just a little sour, not as much as I was expecting. It was delicious!!!

And then because I had so much success with this bread and was so happy about the results, I promptly cut a big gash in my finger when I was slicing the bread for dinner. I ate dinner and decided my finger hurt too much to attempt cleaning the kitchen. That's what Friday mornings are for, right??!?! I'll add a link at the bottom for this recipe.