Terra Americana

Since I listened to a Splendid Table podcast last year about No Kneed Bread I have been trying to master it.  The interview was with Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes Fame (below).  I had been playing around with gluten free flours until my bread machine broke.  The results were always un impressive.  The idea of a dough you could keep in the fridge and use bits of as needed really appealed to me.  But again I was not thrilled with my results.  Always the bread was incredibly dense, very yeasty and too salty for my taste.

I admit to this being an obsession.  My mother was starting to fear I am becoming a kind of mad scientist, making her look at the reaction of each different flour to the rising process.  Through the winter and spring I took a break.  Then I read a piece by Mark Bittman in the New York Times and  Lynne Rosseto Kasper interviewed Jim Lahey of New York City's famed Sullivan Street Bakery, the true originator of the no-knead bread technique.  His theory is to use little yeast and let the bread rise slowly. He also cooks the bread in a super hot oven with a dutch oven. I tried my best mix of flours using a small cast iron pot I had and found much better results.  But my bread was still very dense.

This summer I finally bought his beautiful book, My Bread and invested in a cast iron dutch oven (made in Tennessee no less).  The investment has paid off in spades.  The first bread was a mixture of corn, rice and arrowroot flours which we use for our baking mixes with fantastic results.  It did not rise like I wanted so I broke down and made a loaf with King Arthur, all purpose flour.  It was like the dough jumped out of the beautiful book.  After all my trials and tribulations I had the perfect dough and even more beautiful bread.  So I needed to find a gluten free flour that had a different makeup.  After much research I found an Organic Sprouted Spelt Flour.