Dutch Oven Bread

Never got around to posting this in September after our last camping trip.



Alton Brown's Knead Not Sourdough Bread

I've made this quite a few times over the last few years. Twice last month. It's really not a sourdough, because you add commercial yeast rather than trying to catch wild yeast, or using starter. Whatever it's called, this is one of our favorite things to make while camping. What I do is measure all the dry ingredients, put them in a plastic zipper storage bag, and pour out enough water in a purchased bottle to leave exactly 12 ounces. Then the day before we plan to have the bread, dump everything in a bowl, mix and cover it. It looks so dry, like it's never going to come together, but it does.



That's after 19 hours (or more). Sometimes I don't get to it after exactly 19 hours, but a few hours more certainly don't detract from the result.



And sometimes the loaf gets more time to rise longer than the recipe calls for, too. What I've learned is that you need a dutch oven big enough to accommodate the loaf. A twelve-inch oven is ideal. I've done it in a 10-inch, and just scorched the living hell out of the top, where it hits the lid. We've scraped off the burnt part and eaten it anyway, but it really isn't very pretty. We invested in another 12-inch (=8 quart, 30.5 cm, 7.6 liter) dutch oven last weekend on an up-north 'leaf-peeping' trip, so hopefully this will not happen again.






























A sheet of parchment paper helps to easily transfer the bread to the oven, and then to lift it out of the oven again. It's OK inside the oven while the bread bakes.

The hardest part is judging when it's done. Stick an instant read thermometer into the center. Sometimes it's done in 30 minutes...sometimes not. This last loaf couldn't seem to crack 200F degrees (we had the coals screaming hot to start with, and then they petered out toward the end. Charcoal cooking takes a bit of finesse.). It hit 195, and we called it good. We were hungry. It was not at all doughy/underdone in the center.

We've served this in the form of garlic bread along with a dutch oven lasagna swimming with tomato sauce and melted mozarella. But actually I think our favorite thing is to serve it as is, with bone-in chicken breasts, browned and baked in a dutch oven in butter and olive oil with herbs crammed under the skin. So when we're ripping at the hot bread like hungry baboons, we can drag chunks of it through the reddish-brown, herby, olive oil-butter-chicken drippings in the bottom of the oven.






You could take any bread dough you like, and bake it the same way. If the oven is big enough and you've got a good, even heat source, the sky's the limit. Cast iron does the nicest things to bread or any kind of food.

This bread reminds me of what you would find in a good bakery. Substantial, blistery, crackly exterior. Or as Tim says, 'serious-ass crust'. If you like a soft, yielding loaf with a tender crust, this one isn't for you.