I made bread!

I have now been able to make two delicious loaves of bread, and I feel like I’ve reached a milestone. There really is something magical about combining four basic ingredients, giving it some time, and ending up with a substance that is comforting and nourishing. I start to truly feel the power of the hearth, even when mine’s rented and electric.

But I will also admit that at this point in my real food journey, I’m unsure as to the true health profile of bread. Here is what I do know:

• Bread has four ingredients: flour, yeast, water, salt. You can add other things to change the flavor and consistency, but those four things are all you need to make real bread.
• Typical grocery store bread is not real bread. Just read the ingredients and it’s obvious. Even grocery store bakery bread is rarely real bread.
• As long as people have been growing crops, they’ve been making bread.
• Bread and cheese were once enough for a meal; I never used to understand how that could be, but that’s because I used to think “bread” meant “Wonder Bread” and “cheese” meant American slices. But the more I have learned about real food, the more I started to see how such a meal could indeed be enough. Real, long-risen bread coupled with raw milk cheese is nothing short of divine.
• Many traditional cultures did and still do use bread as a significant portion of their diet.

But here’s where confusion sets in. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation and other nutrition sources like The British Journal of Nutrition, grains naturally contain anti-nutrients such as phytic acid. These substances help protect the grain in its life cycle, but if consumed by humans without neutralizing them, they block absorption of nutrients (hence the name “anti-nutrients”). Ruminant animals, such as cows, can eat “raw” grains without problem because their digestion system is equipped to handle it (having four stomachs has its advantages!). We are not thus equipped, so the idea is that to make grains nutritious, we need to soak grains in an acidic substance for long periods of time to break down the anti-nutrients. This makes grains a nutrient-dense food, instead of a nutrient-robbing food. All of this makes sense, but the more I read, the more I see conflicting information about the entire subject: how to soak, how long, with what, does it actually work or not, did traditional peoples actually do this, etc etc etc. And I have read that bread can/should be made from soaked grains, that if it isn’t, it is too full of anti-nutrients to be worth eating (when one is trying to maximize nutrition).

I don’t eat that much bread, but I do love it as a “butter delivery system” (my favorite name for it ). But I grew concerned about it, given all the information I was turning up. So I took a step back, and decided that when I eat it, I would only eat REAL bread, i.e. flour, yeast, water, and salt. I figured if I wasn’t going to eat soaked-grain bread, I should at least eat the real deal. Luckily, a local natural food store makes & sells delicious loaves made with just those ingredients (and my very favorite loaf of theirs has green olives in it, too…mmmm!). I figured I’d keep investigating the soaking information, and when I was ready, I would start soaking grains and trying to make my own bread, all as a next step further down the road.

Then a week ago, I found a wonderful article on the Mother Earth News site called “Easy, No-Knead Crusty Bread.” Intrigued, I devoured the article, and printed out the recipe. It seemed simple enough, and a contrast to the scenarios in my head. I’ve been intimidated by the whole bread-making process for awhile now. I kept imaging huge undertakings involving a flour-dusted kitchen—floor to ceiling—and endless hours of kneading. Or worse, needing an expensive bread machine to do it all for me.

But before I get into my experience with it, I want to say that this has furthered my interest in bread. It seems that making bread in this way, with long rise/ferment times, is how bread was made before the advent of “fast-rise” breads. Supposedly, all bread was slow-risen before the ’50s or so, when faster, more profitable ways of breadmaking were introduced. I have not yet found what I consider a credible source on this subject, so I’m going to do more reading and will let you know what I find. But the general idea is that a long rise time does the job of breaking down the anti-nutrients—from what I have found so far, this happens without soaking the grains first and with whatever yeast you use, whether sourdough (wild yeast) or baker’s yeast—resulting in an easily-digestible bread with nutrients our bodies can absorb.

My gut feeling is that this makes sense, but I’m not sure if that’s because my gut just wants more of the awesome bread I made.

Ok, on to the recipe. You can read it at the original link above, but here it is with a few of my tweaks and notes:

NO-KNEAD DUTCH OVEN BREAD

INGREDIENTS:

A dutch oven
1 1/2 cups warm water
1/4 tsp. active dry yeast (I used an organic brand)
3 cups flour (I used an unbleached, unbromated basic flour, as it’s what was in the house)
1 1/2 tsp. salt

DIRECTIONS:

1. PART ONE
   1. Get a large bowl, and don’t skimp on bowl size; allow room for the dough to double in size.
   2. Put the warm water in the bowl, then add the yeast and stir it to dissolve well.
   3. Add the flour and salt to the yeast water.
   4. Combine it all well, and you will be left with a dough that is sticky and “shaggy.”
   5. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap:
      
   6. Put the bowl aside, in a warm place (70 degrees). Let the dough “rest” for at least 8 hours, but preferably 12-18. I’ve been letting it sit about 18 hours; I make up the dough at night, maybe around 7ish, and then by about 1 pm the next day, it’s ready for the next steps.
2. PART TWO
   1. You know the dough is ready because it will have doubled in size and will have bubbles on the surface:
      Sorry for the poor photo quality; I was having camera issues. But you can still partly see the bubbles on the top.
      1. NOTE: Sorry I did not get pics of the next several steps! I got too into what I was doing and forgot to snap more until the bread was done, lol! I will take more pics the next time I make bread (next few days) and update this post accordingly.
   2. Lightly flour a work surface and place the dough on it; fold it over on itself a few times. I’ve found the dough to still be quite sticky at this point, but it behaves well enough.
   3. Cover with plastic and let it rest another 15 minutes (I use the same piece of plastic wrap I used for the bowl).
   4. Take a clean dishtowel and give one half of it a light coating of flour. The recipe calls for the dough to be shaped into a ball and placed on this floured area; my dough has not yet ever been in a “ball.” It’s been too malleable to retain any shape. I just put the blob of dough on the towel and keep going, though.
   5. Lightly dust the top of the dough with flour and fold the rest of the towel over it.
   6. Let the dough rest again for 1-2 hours. It is ready when it does not readily spring back when poked.
   7. About 20 minutes before the dough is ready, turn on your oven to 475 degrees and place your covered dutch oven in it to warm as the oven warms (I’ve actually been using closer to 460 or so since the oven here can get too hot).
3. PART THREE
   1. When the dough is ready, take the warmed pot out of the oven and remove the lid.
   2. Carefully remove the dough from the towel (like I mentioned, mine has still been a bit sticky at this point, but I plow right ahead). I shake off excess flour, too. Place the dough in the pot. Give it a few shakes if you need to to settle it in. It’s ok if it spreads out a bit; mine did.
   3. Replace the lid and put the pot back in the oven.
   4. Bake, covered, for 30 minutes.
   5. Remove the lid and continue baking another 10-15 minutes, until it is a golden as you like:
      
   6. Remove from oven, and carefully remove loaf onto a cooling rack (they just pop right out of the pot when you turn it over).
   7. Let cool at least an hour before slicing (I learned that this part is important, lol):
      
   8. Get out your pastured butter and enjoy!

A few notes about my experiences…

• My dutch oven is a 2L heart-shaped Le Creuset. Not typical by any means. I was afraid it was going to be too small, since the original recipe calls for a 6-8 quart pot. This may have some bearing on why my loaves turn out ok even when the dough isn’t holding a ball shape; I do wonder, when I have a larger pot, what the loaf will look like. It might just be a longer, flatter loaf and still be perfectly fine. I’m such a total novice at this that I have no idea. But I must say that my unique dutch oven does the job absolutely perfectly, and it might be employed as nothing but a “bread machine” from now on.
• The first time I tried this, I used *way* too much flour on the dishtowel, and when I did as the original recipe says as to just turning the dough out of the towel and into the pot, lots of extra flour were still on the dough. The bread turned out fine, but some of the crust wasn’t the best due to scorched flour or just caked-on flour. The next time I made it, I picked up the dough from the towel, dusted off excess flour and placed the dough in the pot that way. BIG difference.
• Please note that fresh bread does not last nearly as long as store-bought. This phenomenon has nothing to do with rancidity and everything to do with the yumminess of the bread. Devouring the first loaf in one evening is to be expected…just fair warning.

If you try this, I’d love to know how it works out for you!

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays for February 10, 2010!