Every novice bread baker is familiar – and dare I say – in love with Jim Lahey's excellent No Knead Bread recipe. In fact, I believe that the No Knead Bread recipe may be the most visited NY Times Cooking page to date?
I have also been a fan of this recipe, and received great results, though I haven't made it for a few years in favor of pizza dough or other bread recipes. I decided to restart my Jim Lahey affair though after trying a great rye bread at a party a few months ago. I wondered how the host achieved such a delicious bread, and the response was not what I expected – she used the Jim Lahey recipe!
A few months later, after having this delicious party rye bread flavor and texture settle into my mind, I decided to order some King Arthur Flour Rye flour and restart my bread baking efforts.
My first two attempts at incorporating rye flour into this recipe per Cathy Barrow were a bit stumbling, all due to user error – though the resulting bread still tasted great.
On my first bread attempt, I used active dry yeast instead of instant / rapid rise yeast. Not realizing that deviation from the recipe, I didn't proof the active dry yeast before adding the dry ingredients. After several hours of rising, the bread dough was certainly bubbly, but it hadn't doubled in size. Realizing my error, I then decided to mix in some rapid rise yeast and let the dough continue to rise (thank you Leaf TV for that tip!).
While this step certainly helped a lot, it still resulted in a somewhat flatter loaf, but lesson learned. The second time I made this bread, I used rapid rise yeast from the outset which resulted in a fluffier loaf.
The other flaw I made the first time making this bread was to follow the recipe directions to do a second rise of the loaf on a well-floured towel. That resulted in both a lot of sticking and messiness with both the second rise and then trying to get it into the pot, and I still haven't been able to get my kitchen towel fully clean since then.
The second time , I followed the Cook's Illustrated approach of placing the bread on parchment for the second rise and just putting the parchment in with the bread to bake, which worked out much easier.
The resulting bread from my two attempts looked like:
(Rye Bread attempt #1)
A few additional lessons learned that I need to correct for:
1) The first time I baked the bread, my oven heated well past my desired temp (even though I have an internal oven thermometer, the oven gets less reliable at 400 degree+ temperatures). So we had to scrape off some of the burnt bread bits at the bottom of the loaf before eating. The second time, I put the oven at a lower temperature but didn't pre-heat the pot enough (I think) at only 35 minutes. I think an hour is definitely needed in the pre-heating oven, otherwise our second loaf seemed a bit undercooked at the bottom.
2) I think our dutch oven (largest Le Creuset size) may also be too large to bake the bread, resulting in a longer, flatter loaf than if we used a smaller dutch oven (I read that 5-quart is best for this recipe). I have been thinking about buying a smaller dutch oven anyways, so will try to do this next in a smaller pot. Will report back if that makes a difference to make a taller loaf!
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