Cooking from Scratch

I'm trying recipes for an activity during the long, isolated days. Today I thought no-knead bread would be a good place to start learning about baking bread.  I watched two youtube videos.
Both went on about using just a teeny amount of yeast--1/4 tsp--and 1 1/2 cups of hot water.  Too cold and the yeast will go dormant.

You guessed it, my concept of hot water was not the same as the presenters.  I think I killed the yeast.  Also the dough was not the consistency of those in the video--much thicker.  Which means my 3 cups of flour are not the same as theirs.

So I set it to rise and started another batch.  Jim says with flour, the cup is an inadequate measure.  Needs to be weighed and that means grams of flour.  I have a scale but I had to work carefully through weighing the flour, weighing the flour container, multiply by 2 because I weighed flour in batches. Why didn't we go metric in the 60s?

I baked the first.  Didn't really rise at all but it did brown off nicely in the dutch oven that is used to steam it for 30 minutes at 450 F, then brown it by removing the cover for 15.  Taste is fine, the bread just has no air holes.  You could bowl with it. John likes it and took a slice to the basement to eat.

The second batch is shaggy but dough still doesn't look properly wobbly.   It did rise, but not like theirs.


Batch 3 is from the NYT recipe and requires 18 hours to rise. link   During all that time it develops complex flavor and gluten strings.  Try, try again.  3s the charm. Need to learn to score top.

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