I love bread – not the expired supermarket loaves entombed in their plastic sleeves but the living, breathing stuff that emerges from my oven with a fragrance that fills my kitchen. Our supermarket bread lingers for weeks before finally succumbing to age and humidity. My home-baked loaves are gone in two days and we dream of more as the last crumbs disappear.
I have a Kitchen-Aid five quart mixer with a dough hook that makes short work of prepping bread. Even with that I indulge a lazy streak and often opt for a no-knead variety. This time I turned to one of my favorite no-knead bread cookbooks: Bread, Toast, Crumbs by Alexandra Stafford. Her mother, she says, made home-made bread every day. The memory lingered, as all good bread should, and Ms. Stafford decided to pass the recipe onto posterity. She added more no-knead bread recipes along the way (potato bread, oatmeal-maple, beer bread and three-seed, just to name a few) and rounded out her tome with tempting recipes that incorporated toast and breadcrumbs.
A Fine Cookbook IndeedI gathered my ingredients: flour, salt, water, instant yeast (yes, instant, not active dry) sugar and – to grease the pans – lots of unsalted butter. The recipe I followed filled two, one-quart oven-safe bowls. I combined the ingredients and let it rise, since all bread needs to do that, for an hour to an hour and a half. In the meantime I buttered the bowls to within an inch of their lives. When the bread dough had risen sufficiently I used two forks to deflate, then separated it into two wet chunks and plopped them into the buttered bowls, to rise again and then bake. The result? Bread perfection: two knobby, bowl-shaped loaves that smelled like heaven and sent me there the minute they were cool enough to cut and sample. The generous buttering of the bowls led to a crispy crust. The crumb was hearty, with more holes than a kneaded loaf but certainly nothing resembling the cratering of a foccacia. It was cute. It was tasty. It was love at first sight.
I decided that this bread deserved something special, so I looked up a recipe in the toast section: a very nice looking bruschetta topping that took full advantage of our farm share basil and tomatoes. I put it together, then toasted the peasant bread and loaded it on top. We gobbled it up for dinner. Believe it or not, we still had some tomato topping left. It went into the fridge for lunch the next day.
Perfect Bread, Perfect ToppingI resolve never to shelve this book again. It’s just too delicious and too easy. I want to try more of her toast and crumb recipes and I’m sure I won’t be disappointed.
Want to try the peasant bread master recipe? Here you go, but promise me you’ll buy this book after you make it.