Minimalist Bread with a Crispy Crust

 This week, I made bread. I made no-knead bread, and it was great. It wasn’t just great “for no-knead bread,” or great “for homemade bread.” It was just great.

My mom makes delicious bread from the La Brea Bakery cookbook (our favorite is rosemary olive oil), so I am a bit of a bread snob. I refuse to eat pre-sliced bread of any kind. However, despite my high bread standards, I had never made bread before. But when I found this recipe, which is originally from Mark Bittman’s column The Minimalist for the New York Times, I just had to try it.

I frickin' love bread

If you aren’t familiar with Mark Bittman, familiarize yourself.  We have two of his books at our house: How To Cook Everything (which I recently recommended to a friend who, in the fall, is going to be cooking her own meals for the first time in her life) and The Best Recipes in the World.  If I need a good, simple recipe on the fly, Mark is always the guy I turn to.  As much as I love avant-garde chefs, I always trust Mark Bittman to give me straightforward, delicious recipes.

So when he says that this bread “is incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule that is produced more easily than by any other technique I’ve used, and will blow your mind,” I pretty much have to trust him.

I really recommend reading the original New York Times article, because it explains very articulately why the bread is so special. I will simply tell you that the dough is so wet that it would be impossible to knead, so you have to have patience and let time do all the work for you. It takes some planning, but trust me: it's worth the wait.

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran (optional)
 
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.
Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

And, 24 hours later, there you have it!  I was very pleased with the results, and best of all, it goes with everything: butter, olive oil, jam, honey, or meatballs and marinara sauce.

I also love meatballs.  Anyhow, enjoy the bread!

Dangerously Delicious Garlic Knots

Holy crap, y'all, I do love garlic.

I love garlic so much it is almost unbelievable that I have any friends at all.  I guess it's because I feed them things like this.

These garlic knots are pretty easy to make, and VERY tasty.  I recommend doubling the recipe, because the knots are tiny and you will not be able to stop yourself from eating them.

See?  Real little.

The recipe comes from Food Mayhem.
3/4 c. +1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. table salt
1/3 c. water at room temperature (70 to 90 degrees)
5 1/2 tsp. olive oil, divided
4 large cloves garlic, minced
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1 packed tbsp. chopped fresh parsley

Whisk together flour, sugar, and yeast in a small bowl. Whisk in salt last (preventing direct contact with yeast). Make a well in the center and pour in water. Stir together to moisten the flour, just until dough begins to form, about 20 seconds. The dough will look shaggy and bumpy, not smooth.

Pour 4 teaspoons oil in a 2-cup sized bowl or cup (bigger if you are increasing recipe size). Place dough in and turn to coat. Cover tightly and rest on the counter until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Place a rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat to 400 degrees F at least 30 minutes before baking. Meanwhile, stir together 1/2 teaspoon olive oil, garlic, and kosher salt in a large bowl (you’ll see why later). Set aside.

When the dough is ready, place it on a board and gently press into a 10″ x 6″ rectangle. There will be left-over oil in the cup/bowl that the dough was rising in. Spread that oil over a baking sheet.

Spread half of the garlic mixture across the rectangle dough. Cut into 3/4″ strips (6″ long).

Tie any type of knot and lay on baking sheet with about 2″ space in between. Bake for 12 minutes or until golden. Meanwhile, add the remaining teaspoon of olive oil and parsley to the garlic mixture. Stir.

When garlic knots are done baking, toss in the garlic and parsley mixture and serve immediately.

This recipe makes 12 little garlic knots.  That's two for my mom, two for my dad, and eight for me!

And all too soon, they were gone :(

Enjoy!

Pasta with Shrimp and Tomato-Cream Sauce

So today I fell very suddenly and mysteriously ill.  I spent the entire day reading food blogs, and wishing I could cook instead of being in bed.  When I found this recipe on The Pioneer Woman, I decided to make it tonight, mysterious sickness be damned.

Om nom nom, right?  So let's do it.

Here are the ingredients:
1 lb. penne (Or whatever you want.  I'm not judgmental like that.  Plus I won't even know)
1 lb. shrimp
1 small onion
2 cloves garlic
1/2 c. white wine
8 oz. tomato sauce
1 c. heavy cream
3 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. olive oil
basil and parsley, to taste (I recommend about a tablespoon of each)
salt and pepper, to taste

First, peel, de-vein and rinse the shrimp.  Heat a tablespoon of butter and a tablespoon of oil in a skillet, and fry those suckers up.  A couple minutes should do the trick.

 Okay, now you might want to put some water on to boil.  And, when it boils, maybe put that pasta in.  I'm not going to tell you when to do it, so pay attention.  I know you're on top of it.

Now, chop some onions and garlic.

I'm pretty good at chopping onions, but I suck at chopping garlic.  Slippery little bastards.  So sometimes I use this really handy thing.  You just stick some garlic in and roll it around on the counter.  It's great.  A little tricky to clean.

Now, briefly return to your little shrimps.  Cut them up into bite sized pieces.  I had a system where I cut the heads and tails off in one slice, and then cut the body in half.  But do your own thing.

Once that's done, heat the rest of the butter and oil in a pan.  The pan should be pretty large: eventually it'll hold the pasta, shrimp AND sauce.  When the butter is melted, stir in the onions and garlic.  Then, add the wine.  Mmm, sizzly.

Then add the tomato sauce, followed by the cream.

Yum.  Okay, now we chop our herbs.  Then, add things to our sauce, in this order:
Shrimp-->Herbs-->Pasta (did you forget about the pasta?  Because it should be cooked and strained by now)

Stir it up and it's ready to eat!  It really was delicious.

A Bacon Explosion

This is my first post, and it is actually several months late.  But my page was looking so gloomy and empty that I couldn't wait to make something new, I wanted to post something I'd already done.

So here is our Valentine's Day Bacon Explosion.

Pretty glorious, eh?  Neither of us have much interest in Valentine's Day really, but we do like an excuse for ridiculous quantities of meat.  So when we saw the recipe for the Bacon Explosion, we had to try it.

Many have blogged about it, and now I number among them.  The recipe is pretty simple, and not terribly exact.  So here goes.

2 lb. bacon
2 lb. Italian sausage
1 jar of barbecue sauce
1 jar of barbecue seasoning rub

Now, preheat your oven to 225 degrees.  And in the immortal words of Liz Cheney: let's get cookin'!

Okay, the first step is a lattice of bacon.  I like the squishy-squishy feeling between my fingers.  You should use about half the bacon.

To me, this is fantastic.  Is anyone totally grossed out?  Then don't scroll down.

Fun with close-ups!  Yaaay.  Okay, next step: sprinkle some of your barbecue rub over the lattice.  Sorry I don't have a picture of this step, I'm very new at this.  Now, once you've got it all seasoned and delicious, smoosh the sausage over the lattice.  Yes, all of it.

Less delicious looking, huh?  Don't worry, the lattice comes back.  But first, we have to fry up some bacon.  You know how to fry bacon right?  If you don't, google it or something.  Anyhow, here is a picture of that action:

Mmm, bacon.  Also, don't make fun of our crappy stove and lame-ass paper towels.  We're cooking in a dorm kitchen, we do what we can.

Now, once the bacon is all fried up and drained, you crumble it into small pieces, and sprinkle it on top of the sausage.  Then you load that up with barbecue sauce and rub.  Then, you start to roll it into a log.  It's very important to roll the sausage first, and THEN roll the bacon around it.  Like so:

MMMMMMMMmmmmmmm....

Once your log is finished, it should look like this.  My boyfriend and (vegetarian) roommate were pretty stoked.

Then you slather the outside of your meat log in barbecue rub, and stick it in the oven.  It should cook an hour for each inch of diameter.  Example: ours was about 3 and a half inches thick, so we cooked it for 3 and a half hours.

Exciting, no?

Here's the trick though: you can only eat this on Valentine's Day, because, as we all know, that is the day that calories don't exist.  Also Thanksgiving, but you have to make it with turkey bacon.

As far as serving suggestions go, it's pretty great just on its own.  But we also tried slicing it into hamburger-sized wedges and eating it on rolls with cheese and extra barbecue sauce, and that was worth doing as well.

Enjoy, my fellow fatties!