No-Knead Wheat-Nut Bread
Because I took a little break a for a few months, I figured I'd put out a little extra content for as long as I can keep it up. I'm going to keep this blog shorter than usual (because I'm not actually sure if anyone really reads these). This recipe is super simple, and one I based off of a recipe I found by John Kirkwood on Youtube. He's a retired baker from England (I believe he said England...) and I think his videos are really great. I don't say that a lot when it comes to cooking videos with dialogue.
I have a few tips for this recipe. First off, make sure you wet your hands frequently when dealing with this dough. It's high-hydration, so it's super sticky. In the video, I only waited 45 minutes between each rise of the dough. It would definitely be better if you refrigerate the dough overnight for the first rise, but I wanted to show off a bread that I made in just a few hours. Even though I barely kneaded the dough, and each rise was only 45 minutes, I thought the final product was fantastic.
Ingredients
- 400g Bread Flour
- 75g Rye Flour
- 75g Whole Wheat Flour
- 550g Water
- 8g Active dry yeast (or 1 tsp)
- 1tsp Kosher Salt
- 25g vegetable oil
- Nuts/Seeds (optional)(I used Pumpkin seeds in this video)
- Sesame Seeds for the top (optional)
Recipe:
Mix all the dry ingredients into a bowl first and give them a whisk (no I didn't do this in the video). Add in the water and oil and give the dough a mix until it comes together. Cover and let sit for 45 minutes.
Wet your hands and give the dough a few kneads by slapping it on the counter and folding it over itself. At this point, you can add some nuts or seeds to the bread. I added pumpkin seeds. The bread will probably take a full cup of nuts/seeds, but I only added a few handfuls. Form into a ball, cover and let sit for another 45 minutes.
Wet your hands yet again and fold the dough a few more times over itself. Form it into a ball and set it aside while you grease some kind of round pan (I used my wok). Cover the pan with sesame seeds and place the dough ball upside-down into the seeds. The top of the dough should be down onto the seeds. Dust the dough with a little flour on the bottom (which will be facing up) so a towel won't stick to it. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.
While the dough sits, heat your oven to 450 degrees and set a dutch oven in the center to heat up. Let them heat up for a full half-hour. If you don't have a dutch oven, get one.
This part gets tricky. After a half hour, or whenever the dough doubles in size again, remove your dutch oven from the regular oven. Be careful, it will be incredibly hot. For this next part, you could dump the dough directly into the pot from whatever bowl or wok it's currently in. I'm not very good at doing that, so I like to dump the dough on the table first, wet my hands, then drop the dough into the dutch oven by hand.
Once the dough is dumped into the hot dutch oven, put on some oven gloves and give the dough a swirl in the pan. this will center it in the pan a little. Put the lid on the dutch oven and return it to the regular oven. Bake for 30 minutes. After that, remove the lid from the dutch oven and bake for another 5-10 minutes, or until the top gets golden brown.
Remove the bread to a cooling rack and let it sit for at least a half-hour. I like to cut my bread into slices, then place them all in a large freezer bag. I find that keeps the bread nice and fresh. You can also freeze it.
Sorry for the sloppy writing. Hopefully this is understandable, and hopefully you'll give this a try! Let me know if you think you have any improvements.
