In which it’s the #breadin5 recipe!

Okay. So. There are cheeses that need to be enjoyed with good bread. Not the crap from the Safeway bakery, but good bread. What they call artisan bread now, what used to be rustic peasant bread.

Bread you can only get from fancy bakeries now.

I got too spoiled with those Salty Tart baguettes at my last job, okay? Those baguettes were a revelation. I mean, there is no better way to eat a gooey, creamy, funky French brie than with a real baguette. We don’t have gooey, creamy, funky French bries, really, but we do have some brie and a bunch of other cheeses that would benefit from good bread.

Anyway, now I live in rural Oregon and we don’t have a fancy bakery. We have a Safeway, and their bread is pretty, and well-displayed in the store, and it all tastes exactly the same and the crust and crumb are too soft and too bland and it’s just depressing.

So, maybe it’s time for me to do that refrigerator bread thing. Yeah. Maybe. It was all the rage awhile back and maybe now I have the experience to understand it.

Yesterday I made this recipe. Sorta. What I did was:

3 cups 100F tap water
1 packet yeast
2 teaspoons salt
6-1/2 cups (2 pounds) flour

I used about 5 cups of King Arthur Unbleached All Purpose and about one cup of atta (Indian whole wheat flour, which I bought for roti/chapati).

Mixed it in my largest mixing bowl with the wire handle of one of my spatulas, covered it with plastic wrap, and left it in the oven (with the light on) for two hours to rise. It got huge.

Moved it to the fridge until it was well chilled (maybe 4 hours or so?), and then made a pizza with it.

I generally hate doughy pizzas and always prefer a thinner crust, but this dough is GOOD.

(The pizza was made with leftover garlic butter from an artichoke I ate, store-bought Parmesan Reggiano tomato sauce, a vanishingly rare (as in it’s no longer being made and there’s not much in existence) goat milk gouda I got from work, red pepper, white onion, and fresh spinach. It was fucking fantastic.)

Today I made a boule.

The dough broke when I lifted it out of the bowl, so I shaped the loaf out of two pieces. The piece on the inside exploded through the scores!

Oven spring for the win!

In the oven was a cast iron griddle and a stainless steel bowl. When pre-heated, put the loaf on parchment paper on the griddle, poured hot tap into the bowl for steam.

Also misted the inside of the oven with a spray bottle of water four or five times during baking, which probably took around 40 minutes or so, for additional moisture.

The crust is fantastic, crispy and delicate. The crumb is soft and chewy. Next time I’ll let the loaf sit on the counter for 90 minutes, get bigger holes in the crumb.

The recipe is supposed to make four 1-pound loaves, so there’s probably enough dough left for two or three baguettes. Might bake those up this afternoon and then mix another batch of dough!

Or might let the dough sit and develop in the fridge for a few days first.

Anyway, this dough is cool. With some in the fridge, you can have any bread you want in very little time–a pizza, a boule, a baguette, flatbread, focaccia, dinner rolls, whatever.

—
Here’s the mother recipe for this fridge method.

And here’s the original book: