Just Wow

Once the dough has risen, you put it in a dutch oven (I only have a clay one, I'm sure cast iron would be awesome too.) and bake with the lid on for a bit (yay, steam) and then the lid off for a bit. Despite some snafus (dough stuck to towel, leading to slight collapse, and a rather sloppy dropping of the dough into the clay dutch) this came out of the oven.

Wow.

So, this may be an ugly hunk of bread, but holy crap is it delicious. Quoting M, "Best Crust Ever", and IMHO (oh, yeah, I just "IMHO"d you) the crumb was pretty damn awesome as well. We had to try as hard as possible not to eat the entire thing right away. On a web recommendation, I'd upped the salt to just under a tablespoon, and that was a bit too much, but it didn't slow down our eating.

So, with all the bread experimenting that I've been doing, the by far best results have been with a recipe that a minimally-supervised 4-year-old could nail perfectly. Unbelievable.

I'm serious, this is easily one of the best breads I have ever had. So, before you get started making it, let me give you some valuable info.

The recipe is here. While I am sure this done straight will make a great bread, there are some very valuable optimizations online.

Some modifications, which I applied (more salt, 50% whole wheat flour, longer ferment times) and a video of the entire process are here. This is a must-read-and-watch before starting.

Lastly, having learned from this one, there are lots of other tips for things like making it neater and reducing towel-stickage and such on here.

I have actually already started two more of these (also 50% whole wheat and using 2tsp of salt (regular, not kosher)): one for pizza (dinner tomorrow), and one that will come out of the oven when we got to sleep tomorrow night and will be cooled, fresh, and waiting for us for breakfast the next morning.

My big recommendation is that you start two, because once the first one comes out your biggest concern will be that you wish you had another one.

Yeah, seriously.