It's not a failure, by any means.....it's just that it didn't work out quite as expected.......

Last night I tried 'Jim Lahey's Easy no-knead Artisan Bread' recipe. There's also a link to it on the left of the home page under 'Useful Links'. 

I followed the recipe. 390 gms of strong white bread flour, half a teaspoonful of instant yeast, 7 gm of sea salt and 320 gms of water. 

I mixed it up together as the recipe requires, starting with the Dutch whisk and ending up with my hands. The dough looked and felt as sticky as the recipe said it should. 

It then went into an oiled plastic bowl covered in cling film and sat on the kitchen table for 14 hours.

This morning, I tipped out a very nicely risen dough and knocked it back. I tried the parchment paper as a base....but the dough was so sticky, the parchment paper was more trouble than it was worth or needed to be at 7 a.m. 

I think that's where I made my mistake. I compromised. I put it straight into a rather large Le Creuset cast iron casseole dish, covered it in cling film, and put it into the airing cupboard for two hours. 

I put the oven on 235 degrees C and then realised that I couldn't preheat the casserole dish before dropping the dough into it. I think that's where I might have lost some oven spring. 

After 25 minutes, I tool off the lid and thought 'well, maybe it'll rise now', but the casserole dish was too wide for such a small dough mix. There was room to outwards rather than upwards and dough is notoriously laz,  I'm afraid. It turned a lovely colour over the remaining 25 minutes but it never rose like I wanted it to. 

However, on cutting it open, you can see that it has the airy texture of a French baguette. The crust is crisp and the bread soft. I dare say it won't keep very long, but that's not going to be an issue anyway. 

So, all in all, not a total failure by any means. Just a lesson in the benefits of using a smaller  container  with steeper sides or doubling the mix. It's as simple as that.

With hindsight, I should have completed the second prove in the blue plastic bowl and preheated the casserole dish. I could then have tipped the dough into a hot dish and put on the lid. That's the lesson for next time. I'll try it again in a week or so.....stay tuned! 

Happy baking.....