We baked King Arthur Flours’s recipe for ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ found at ‘King Arthur Flour dot com’ this week with great success.  Our previous attempts ~ while tasting great ~ resulted in loaves that hadn’t risen very high, spreading out on the baking sheet. So this time we split the yeast dough into two portions, and baked them individually in our 8.5 inch Dutch Oven ~ an enameled cast iron pot and lid ~ as described in many of King Arthur’s bread recipes.

This is a very simple recipe, and my role was to stir and incorporate the ingredients by hand, and clean up the kitchen afterwards.  We included a portion of whole wheat flour into the recipe, and adjusted the baking time slightly based on our individual oven performance. We placed half of the risen dough into the buttered Dutch Oven, and covered it with the lid to rise again.  After rising, the Dutch Oven was put into the cold oven and baked as the recipe calls for.  It couldn’t be simpler.  The other half of the dough was refrigerated overnight and baked off the next day.

The Dutch Oven keeps the shape of the bread from spreading out, resulting more in a ‘cake form’ rather than a traditional oval artisan loaf shape.  My wife scored the first loaf with a crosshatch design prior to baking, causing it to flatten somewhat and resulting in a loaf that was 2.5 inches tall.  Our second loaf wasn’t scored, which helped it keep its height, resulting in a 3 inch tall loaf which is what we’ll do from now on.  The little hole you see in the top of the second loaf is from the temperature probe, to ensure the loaf was baked to the correct temperature.

Here’s a gallery of our baking efforts this week.  We couldn’t be more pleased with the result of baking our bread in a Dutch Oven ~ enjoy! ☼ 🙂