Tag Archives: No-Knead Crusty White Bread

by

Our Adventures In Baking ~ No-Knead Crusty Bread

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! ☼ 🙂

by

Adventures in Baking ~ Our Artisan Bread

We’ve found the King Arthur Flour recipe for ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ to be our favorite go-to bread recipe, with the perfect crust, flavor and texture that we love.  It’s simple and easy to make, and my wife makes up a batch of dough each week to keep in the refrigerator for baking fresh artisan bread throughout the week.  This bread doesn’t rise very high in the oven for us, but regardless, the flavor is totally worth it!

The one change we’ve made since first experimenting with this recipe, is that we’ve switched to using unbleached all purpose flour. The gallery shows a selection of different loaves we’ve made over the past weeks, which completes my posts for this recipe.  We bake other types of bread and rolls as well, so in future posts I’ll begin discussing these recipes ~ enjoy! 🙂

by

Our Artisan Bread ~ White Whole Wheat Bread

This is my fourth post of baking artisan bread using a King Arthur Flour ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ recipe, except this time we experimented by using White Whole Wheat Flour for half of the flour used for the batch of dough.  We loved the result of the ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ recipe, and wanted to see how it worked with King Arthur Flour’s White Whole Wheat Flour as a variation on the theme.

The benefit of using this recipe is having a large batch of dough available in the refrigerator for up to a week, with the option of using only the amount of dough needed for the day’s requirement.  It turned out that our first batch of the White Whole Wheat Bread mixture varied from the original Crusty White Bread loaves in a couple of ways.  The white whole wheat flour must be somewhat denser and not as light and airy, and as a result the air holes within the loaves were smaller and the bread was a little denser.  The other difference was that the crust was thick and chewy, as opposed to thick and crusty in the original recipe.

At that point we experimented in letting the dough rise for longer periods at room temperature before baking, after removing it from the refrigerator.  This technique seemed to allow the air pockets to develop further before baking, but mostly just under the top crust leaving large holes in each slice.  The taste of the White Whole Wheat Bread was wonderful regardless, but our preference is to stick with the original recipe, which is our favorite!  Here’s a gallery of photos showing our experimentation with White Whole Wheat Bread ~ enjoy! ☼ 🙂

by

Our Artisan Bread ~ Round Three

This is round three of my wife and I baking artisan bread using a King Arthur Flour’ recipe for ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ – the third and last of three batches from the original batch of dough from the recipe. This recipe is a keeper, producing wonderfully tasting bread with a well textured crust and a nice dispersion of air holes throughout the loaf.  Our next adventure in baking will be to pick out another different recipe and begin experimenting with a variety of bread recipes, and I’ll share the results here with you.  In the meantime, enjoy the photos of our third loaf of artisan bread!

by

Our Artisan Bread ~ Round Two

This is round two of my wife and I baking artisan bread using a King Arthur Flour’ recipe for ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ – the second of three batches from the original batch of dough from the recipe.  My wife formed this loaf, and learned a few new lessons.  I formed the first loaf, and didn’t fuss with the shape, and when I cut the crosses on top of the dough, I did more pulling of the dough than cutting.  My wife spent more time forming the dough today, and instead of cutting the marks by pulling the knife as I did, she simply pushed down into the dough which left the nice, decorative marks.  Live and learn – she’s the Master Baker for years and years, and I’m simply the apprentice!  The taste was just as fabulous as before, with a nice crunchy crust and distribution of air holes throughout the loaf – I’ll let the photos explain the rest! ☼ 🙂

by

Baking Our First Artisan Bread

Today my wife and I baked our first loaf of artisan bread using a King Arthur Flour’ recipe for ‘No-Knead Crusty White Bread’ – the result tastes even better than our loaf of bread looks like in the photographs – and there’s dough enough left in the refrigerator for baking two more loaves in the coming days! ☼ 🙂