No Knead Bread - Nicole's Variation (w/ Instructions)

Jim Lahey (of Co) is credited with popularizing "no knead bread" - in particular with this article in the NY Times.
The following is Nicole's variation on the recipe, complete with some fairly helpful instructions (please to pay attention to the bit about OVEN MITTS!).


Equipment

• Big bowl
• Big fork
• Plastic wrap or plate to cover big bowl
• Parchment paper
• Cast iron or enamel pot with lid
• Heavy oven mitts

Ingredients

• 3 cups flour (1.5 cups all-purpose, 1.5 cups whole wheat)
• ¼ tsp yeast
• 2 tsp salt
• Ground pepper to taste
• 1 cup shredded pizza cheese (optional)
• 1-1/2 cups water
• Oil for the parchment paper and your hands

   
Instructions
   
Put all the ingredients except the water and oil in the big bowl and mix them up with the fork.  Get everything evenly distributed.

Add the water, and mix with the fork until you have a ball of shaggy, lumpy dough. It should be moist enough that you don’t have crumbs of dry flour in the bottom of the bowl and sticking to the dough, but not so wet that it won’t stay in a soft ball shape.  You can add a little more flour or water to get it to the right texture.  But there’s a big margin of error here, so don’t worry about it too much.

Cover the bowl with the plate or plastic wrap and let it sit for 12-18 hours (again, there’s a margin of error here. 10 hours works. 24 hours works). The dough will get moister and bubbly, and will look sort of gray and yucky, but that’s okay.

Once the dough has spent the requisite time sitting around, place an 18” long sheet of parchment paper on the counter. Grease it with a little oil. Grease up your hands.  Reach into the bowl and scoop out the dough. Form it into a soft ball.  It may collapse a little. That’s okay. But if it’s totally goopy, just massage in some more flour until it will hold a soft ball shape without collapsing too much (i.e., it should still be a few inches high and not flatten out into a disc).

Put the ball in the center of the oiled parchment paper.  Turn the big bowl upside down over it so that it can rise in peace for 2 hours (I usually clean the bowl out first so that the leftover scraps of dough don’t turn into cement).

About an hour before you’re going to put the bread in the oven, stick the pot in the oven with the lid on and preheat the oven to 450 F.  The pot has to heat up for about an hour.  The concept is that the pot is a domed bread oven within which the bread cooks.

When the bread is ready to go in the oven, put on the oven mitts and take the pot out. Take the lid off. DO NOT FORGET THE OVEN MITTS!  Do not turn off the oven.  It should stay at 450 F.

Using a sharp knife, make an X-shaped slit in the top of the dough.  If you don’t do this, it doesn’t matter - it just looks prettier this way when it’s done.  Sprinkle some chunky salt on top if you want.

Put the dough in the pot by picking up the ends of the parchment paper so that it’s like a sling, and lowering the parchment paper and dough into the pot. You just leave the parchment paper underneath the dough, with the ends hanging out of the sides of the pot.

Put the lid on. USE THE OVEN MITTS!

Put the covered pot in the oven.

Bake for 30 minutes.

Using the OVEN MITTS, take the lid off the pot. If the bread is nicely golden brown and looks done, take the pot out and remove the bread by picking up the ends of the parchment paper and lifting it out.  Let the bread cool on a rack before cutting it.  If the bread doesn’t look done, let it cook another 5-10 minutes with the lid off.   In any event, when it’s done, let it cool on a rack.

After (at least!) 10 minutes, feel free to consume most of the bread, quite possibly with liberal doses of olive oil...

Incidentally, you can also use the dough to make great pizza, like the lemon / smoked mozarella / rosemary one below...