Here's how the recipe works: combine flour, yeast, and salt in a bowl. Add water and stir with a spoon. Allow to sit overnight. Shape into loaf and allow to rise. Bake in a preheated Dutch oven. What emerges from the Dutch oven is a crisp, crackly, deeply colored loaf of bread with a crust that snaps and pops as it cools. Slice into the bread and you see the open, airy, wildly bubbly crumb of the best artisanal bakeries with a tender, chewy texture.
Nearly perfect bread, in other words. Now, there are those including myself who'd criticize the flavor. The original recipe was under-seasoned as Lahey himself has even admitted , and with its short, warm fermentation period, it doesn't develop the rich, complex, malty flavors of a truly great loaf. But these are minor quibbles in what is otherwise a completely revolutionary recipe. Even more interesting to me than that it works is how it works, because by understanding the how, we can then modify the recipe to fit many different baking situations, even improving its flavor.
But before we get there, let's take a quick look at the awesome science behind this equally awesome recipe. While the no-knead part of the no-knead dough recipe certainly has some cool action going on, at least for home bread bakers and we'll get to it soon , the real important innovation here is baking the bread in a Dutch oven, and it works in two ways: by increasing the radiant energy heating the bread, and by increasing the humidity of the baking environment.
For those of you who don't know what a Dutch oven is, it's a thick-gauge, large pot with a heavy, relatively tight fitting lid. Want to read about our favorites? Here's our review of the best Dutch ovens on the market. You see, a ball of dough isn't the homogeneous blob that it appears to be. It's in fact a very complex network of bubbles of carbon dioxide gas both large and small produced as living yeast consume sugars.
These bubbles are separated separated by thin, stretchy, flexible sheets of gluten that's the network of proteins that provide structure to good bread. How does a ball of raw dough go from being small and dense to large, light, and airy?
Through a phenomenon known as oven spring. When that dough first enters a hot oven, both the carbon dioxide gas inside those bubbles as well as some of the water vapor trapped in them begin to expand due to the increase in heat. This expansion causes the stretchy bubbles to inflate—for a little while.
Eventually, the proteins in that make up the gluten will coagulate and set, preventing the dough from expanding any more. The trick to airy bread is to get those bubbles to increase in size as rapidly as possible, giving them plenty of volume before the proteins have time to set. This is accomplished by transferring as much energy as possible as fast as possible to the dough.
And that's where the Dutch oven comes in. Most folks tend to get inordinately obsessed with temperatures. In reality, it's not temperature that matters, but energy, and the transfer thereof. What I'm getting at is this. There's no way for it to get hotter, because unless you are providing some sort of external energy source, there's no way for an object to get hotter than its surroundings. Basic thermodynamics here. One word: radiation.
See, the thick cast iron or stainless steel, or ceramic, or whatever your Dutch oven is made of sides of a Dutch oven can hold onto a massive amount of heat energy, and that energy is constantly being emitted in the form of electro-magnetic radiation. However, because a Dutch oven is so much smaller, and because radiant energy decays over distance, objects inside the small, enclosed space of a Dutch oven absorb much more energy through radiation than an object sitting in the center of a large oven.
Think of it this way: you are the loaf of bread, and the walls of the oven is a circle of kids in storm trooper costumes, ready to barrage you with a hailstorm of foam missiles shot at low velocity out of Nerf-N-Strike Alpha Trooper guns.
In a normal oven, these storm troopers are pretty far away—say, feet. They'll shoot at you with all they've got, but only a relatively small number of their darts will actually make contact. You get mildly annoyed. Now take that same scenario, but change their striking distance to a mere 10 feet. Same number of kids with guns that is, same temperature , but this time, many many more of them are actually gonna be able to hit you. You get screaming mad, blowing up just like a balloon. All make sense now?
On top of all that, there's another factor involved: humidity. Professional bakers often use steam-injected ovens in order to increase the humidity of the baking environment. This is because moist air transfers heat much more efficiently than dry air, once again increasing the rate of transfer of energy between the oven and the loaf of bread. Without well-developed gluten, your bread or rolls would be flat and tough. These four simple step-by-step instructions will yield well-developed gluten.
I love the video, I love making my own bread too. I even mill my own flours and next year I'm hoping grow my own wheats. I just planted a few of my favorite wheat grains. Milling your own flour really makes the bread taste unbelievably better. Although, homemade bread of any flour is fabulous! I still love my white breads, which you can't produce your own.
But what creates that elasticity? The endosperm of the wheat contains two important proteins, gluten, and gliadin. When wheat flour is mixed with water, these two proteins link with the water molecules and crosslink with each other as they are physically manipulated by kneading.
It takes a certain amount of physical manipulation to bring these molecules into contact and create strong links. As the kneading continues and these molecules create stronger bonds, gluten is formed.
It is gluten that gives the dough elasticity.
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