Pot Loaf

I discussed a few bread baking tips with my sister, Sunny, today and decided I'd actually test some of these great tips to see if they work! It has been quite some time since I'd tried the Jim Lahey method of baking bread in a cast iron Dutch oven. Somehow, I've never been too attracted to the idea; maybe it is just too simple. So, using the Lahey-Bittman method of a quick rise (using a few drops of red wine vinegar in the dough), I began the dough this morning and just finished baking my first loaf. It looks great! I have another in the oven. I'll be cutting into this shortly, but have no fear that it didn't come out just as Jim said it would.

As Jim explained in the video, I used very little yeast, water at 120 F, with an initial rise of 3 hours. I used 1000 grams of flour with 750 grams of water and divided the dough into two loaves. (75% hydration...) My pot is fairly large. I used a 475 degree convection oven for the entire baking process. For the uncovered portion, the time was about 10 minutes, maybe less, probably accelerated by the convection oven. The inside temp was 200 at the end of the baking.

The Stretch and Fold Technique from Peter Reinhart

Here is helpful tip from baker Peter Reinhart. He has recently modified his baking techniques to embrace more of the no-knead principles. I like the idea of folding the dough, but I do it differently. If you take the dough from the bowl with wet hands and just lift it, the sides naturally droop, thus beginning the fold. Then you can manipulate the dough into a ball by continually tucking the drooping sides under the center of the mass.

As he points out in this video, the dough will become more firm on top. His timing is about right though it doesn't make a lot of difference.

Jim Lahey seems to only fold the dough once and not until after it has fermented for quite a few hours. His method also seems to work. So, once again, there seems to be a lot of flexibility in how this can be done and still have excellent results.

As with anything else, practice will make you better and you'll probably develop your own variation on this theme.