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        Life in rural France - Food - Friends - Wine - Cheese - Comments

   Welcome to French Food Focus. The name describes the intent of this blog. I'll focus on food and because I live in rural   
   France the stress will be upon French food.  There are numerous posts concerning life in France and, certainly, opinions
   about anything that strikes my fancy.
   If you have some good recipes  or if you want to rave about any great French restaurants this  is the place to do it.

 I hope you enjoy my ramblings about rural France! 

Click Here to send me a comment
           
                   

This is our village. Our house is the white one at the top right.                      

No Knead bread

If you've been reading this blog you will know that I'm very enamored by the quick, no knead, bread recipe. Its so easy to make and tastes so good that I can't resist it.
Today I made a batch using a flour mixture for 'Pain de Campagne". In other words country bread. The technique was the same only the flour was different. I also decided to photograph the process in the hopes of tempting other to make this bread.

Its incredibly easy.

 The ingredients are simple: flour, salt, yeast & water.

I'm using a flour mixture today for making country style bread. Its whole wheat. We're lucky here in France as I'm easily able to buy flour for multigrain & organic bread in addition to regular strong bread flour.

  All I've done is to:

    - warm the bowl
    - put in 4 cups flour, a generous pinch of salt & the yeast.
    - add about 3 cups of WARM water.
    - stir until mixed well.

Getting the water right is important. You want the mixed dough to be slightly sticky. Add water or flour to get the consistency right. A few tries will get you there; the bread will turn out OK in any case.

Here's the dough in its bowl and now covered with cling film.

Now it needs to be kept warm (75-100 degrees F.) so that the yeast will work & it will rise.

  As you can see I've covered the dough with a couple of dish clothes. What you can't see is the hot water bottle underneath. Its been pretty cold in our kitchen so this was my solution to make sure the dough had enough heat to rise properly.

As you can see the dough has risen nicely after 4 hours of sitting there. I suspect that you could get away with less rising time, but 4 hours is safe.

Here's a close up of the risen dough

Now you need to coat your hands in vegetable oil and lift the dough out of the bowl. Since I use 4 cups of flour I was able to make two loaves, one large & one small.

Here they are on a board. Using the oil makes sure your hands don't stick too badly to the dough.

All I've done is to gently pat the loaves into shape. No kneading !

  Cover the loaves back up with cling film, cover them & let them rise in a warm place for about 30 minutes.

While their rising turn on your over to 230 degrees C. with the vessels you are going to cook the bread in in the oven.

    Only three thing are important about the vessels:

    1) They're large enough to contain the dough comfortably
    2) They will take the high oven heat
    3) They have a removable lid.

I've used a large metal cooking pot, an earthenware casserole and the pots you see in the picture. All worked equally well.

After about 30 minutes of rise and heating in the oven you need to transfer the dough to the HOT pots. Be very careful, the pots are HOT!

Here's the smaller loaf in its pot ready for oven.

Note that I haven't fiddled around with the shape. It will even out in the oven.

  Here are the loaves after about 20 minutes in the oven. Looking good.

At this point take the lids off CAREFULLY! HOT!
This will finish off the cooking & crisp up the crust.

Take the loaves out after another 10 minutes or when you think the crust is browned enough and fiem  when you tap it.

Here they are out of the oven.

Now, just carefully tip the loaves onto a cooling rack & you are done.

Pretty easy- right? And believe me they taste great. We normally eat the smaller loaf fresh & freeze the other on in two halves. It thaws out beautifully with no problem.

We find this better than what we can buy & that's saying a lot here in France. And much superior to the stuff that comes out of an electric bread maker.

Try it you'll love it!