She was the one that told me you can bake bread in it, so I googled it of course. Of the ones that show up at the top, I did end up using the one that is listed first.
http://www.simplysogood.com/2010/03/crusty-bread.html
The recipe and instructions:
3 cups all purpose flour
1-3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast
1-1/2 cups water
In a large mixing bowl, whisk together flour, salt, and yeast. Add water and mix until all the flour is incorporated. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and set aside for 12-18 hours.
Heat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. When the oven has pre-heated, place cast iron pot with a lid in the oven and heat for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, pour dough onto a heavily floured surface and shape into a ball. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit while the pot is heating. Remove hot pot from the oven and drop in the dough. Cover and return to oven for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid and bake another 15 minutes. Remove bread from oven (and pot) and place on a a cooling rack to cool.
You can add other ingredients for flavour (down below I'll show my experiment with garlic and cheese), but that's all there is to the basic recipe.
The other tools you'll need are plastic wrap and possibly aluminum foil. The picture shows parchment paper because I had originally planned on using it, but ultimately decided to go with what my mom does - follow the recipe exactly as given the first time through.
Here's all the steps with my images :)
Whisk together flour, salt, and yeast. I actually had put them in the bowl and let them sit for awhile before adding the water because I keep my flour in the freezer. Since I don't do a lot of baking, Mom says keeping the flour in the freezer will just help keep it fresher longer. She knows WAY more about cooking and baking than I ever will, so I tend to follow her advice.
Add water and mix. I ended up add just a little more water because all the flour wasn't incorporated. Don't be surprised if this happens to you. Making bread is really affected by humidity and since it's winter in Alberta there isn't much humidity in the air right now. Just go slow with adding the additional water. I maybe added an extra 1/4 cup tops.
Cover bowl with plastic wrap and set aside. You may notice the elastic band I had to put around the bowl. Despite Glad's claims of "Clings Tight Without a Fight!" written right on the box, I'm always fighting with Cling Wrap. The only thing I can guarantee it'll cling to is itself, so I needed some assistance to get it to cling to the bowl.
I mixed this up about 7pm so it would rise overnight. Here's what it looked like at about midnight. You can kind of see filled out the bottom of the bowl and has lots of bubbles.
This was 9am the next morning. I was surprised at how much it grew overnight. I had left it sit on that same counter overnight, but had to slide it closer so I could take the pictures. When I did that, some of the bubbles popped and it's weird to see your bread breathe.
I was going to bake it in the afternoon so that it would be ready to take to Mom and Dad's for supper that night. It didn't change much over the next 5 hours.
I turned the oven on. Setting the oven to 450 degrees is hot! It smells different than the regular 350 degrees, or maybe that's just because I need to clean the oven and this was now really burning the stuff that's at the bottom. When it was pre-heated I put the pot in. Since the lid I have says it's only good up to 350 degrees I wasn't using it and I didn't bother putting the aluminum foil in to pre-heat. The beauty of aluminum foil is that it gains and loses heat so quickly, so even if you do pre-heat it, as soon as you take it out of the oven (when it's time to put the bread in), it's going to cool off. Just don't waste your time with that.
When the pot goes in, you're supposed to pour the dough onto a heavily floured surface. You can see how sticky it is. I was able to tilt the bowl and snap a couple photos before it came out of the bowl. I ended up needing to use a rubber scrapper to help with this.
It does lose a lot of volume when you shape it into the ball on the counter and this is essentially the step of kneading a traditional recipe to deflate all those bubbles. The plastic wrap is the same piece that originally covered the bowl and will stick to this ball a bit.
After the pot has been heated for 30 minutes, drop the ball of found in. Flour your hands and it's still going to stick! You don't need to oil the pot, and since it's at 450 degrees you'll hear the dough sizzle a bit when it hits the hot pot because it starts to bake right away. Be sure that you use oven mitts when you cover it with the aluminum foil!
Here's after the first 30 minutes of baking. I like that my bread somehow got a razorback ridge to it.
Return uncovered bread to the oven for another 15 minutes. Here's the golden bread in the pot and then just on the cooling rack. You can hear it crackle as it starts to cool.
It makes bread with big holes in it. Very crusty outside and a very soft centre. I think it's good for an accompaniment to soups and as the side dish, but I don't think it would really work for sandwiches. Both my mom and brother said it's a very European bread (and that was funny to me because it was two different conversations about a half-hour apart).
Second try with cheese and garlic!
Since not everyone has a enamelled cast iron pot, I thought I'd try the suggestion of using another pot. I was initially going to try the stainless steel dutch oven I have, but it has plastic handles and I wasn't sure they'd stand up to the high temperature, so I went with my iron wok.
I also added 1 cup of grated marble cheese (it's what I had in the fridge) and 1-1/2 teaspoons of minced garlic. The scientist in me says this was not a good idea changing two things at once (new ingredients and new pot) because if it didn't work I wouldn't know which part caused the trouble.
This dough looked a bit wetter than the first batch, not sure if you can see that in the picture. It really smelled like garlic, so I was concerned that the taste would be too strong.
It was really sticky when I tried to put it on the counter and my hands were completely covered this time.
Still sizzled when it was dropped in the wok.
30 minutes later - looking good!
All finished!
I flipped it over to see what the bottom looked like. The only thing with using the wok was that it does shape the sides of the bread a bit because the bread got bigger than the flat part of the wok.
The cheese in it is good, but I was surprised that you couldn't really taste the garlic, especially since it had a very strong smell when it was rising and then baking. I think I'd like to try roasting the garlic first to see if that changes anything and maybe trying a stronger flavoured cheese that just plain marble.
We'd love to hear what combinations of ingredients you try and what kind of pot you use!
~Lisa
