[jastingo]

> There are way simpler, no-knead recipes you can bake in a Dutch oven that will give you even better results.

Care to elaborate and/or post links to recipes? I've been baking for years and have found that the recipes with longer rise times generally produce more flavorful loaves. Yes, it's more effort and takes longer, but the payoff is a more flavorful bread.

That said, if there are recipes out there that require less time AND are more flavorful, I would love to hear about them.

[girzel]

The absolute best-tasting "regular sourdough" I've ever made came from grinding my own wheat berries. I'm not actually that excited about whole-wheat bread, but what I do is get a 25-pound sack of wheat berries from Eastern Washington (I'm in Seattle), grind out about 120g, and make a "dry poolish" -- something like 40% hydration -- with the sourdough starter and a touch of malt powder (commercial flour has enzymes already added). Leave that in the fridge overnight, or for a day or two, and then use that to build a regular sourdough dough (which also gets bulk fermented in the fridge later).

Takes planning (and a grinder!), but very little effort. You get the all flavor of "real" whole wheat, compounded by slow fermentation, and the resulting bread is some of the best I've ever tasted.

I tried doing the same thing with ground rye berries, but oddly it wasn't all that exciting.

[mikro2nd]

Here's one:

3 metric cups of Brown Bread Flour or Wholewheat flour, 1 sachet instant yeast (personally we have a homegrown sourdough starter, but that's a whole other topic). You can get by with a little less yeast, and with bought-in yeast I'd add about a teaspoon of sugar to get the yeast well fed. A good handful of sunflower seeds and/or pumpkin seeds if you like. I like to add about a tablespoon of linseeds. This is all optional. 1 scant teaspoon of salt. (This is not optional.)

Mix all the dry ingredients, then add water to make a sloppyish dough and mix well -- you can stir it with a spoon, but not easily, and it's sticky as hell. It takes about 1.5 to 2 cups of water, but it will vary depending on the flour, how old the flour is, the weather/humidity on the day, etc.

I like to dust the top of the loaf with a tablespoon or so of poppy seeds.

Turn the dough into a well-greased loaf tin and bung the tin in a plastic bag. Lift the bag away from the top of the loaf otherwise the dough will stick when it rises. Warm places are good, but it's not critical, and too warm is bad. Rising time could be as short as an hour, could be as long as 3 or 4 (unusual) and depends on too many factors to enumerate here. Once you've baked a loaf or two you'll have a good idea how long it takes given your flour, yeast, weather, etc.

When the dough has risen and seems ready to overflow the tin, put it into a 180C oven for 1 hour. When it comes out of the oven, immediately tip the load out of the tin and allow to cool on a rack. If the loaf won't tip easily out of the tin, you didn't grease the tin well enough.

A good test of whether your loaf is 'done' is to tap the bottom with a fingertip. It should sound 'hollow' and not 'dead', but honestly, if you've never had experience with breadmaking before, you'll be hard-pressed to hear much difference. It's one of those things that comes with experience, much like the feel/consistency of dough in more complicated breads.

It's very easy, takes about 5 minutes and lasts better than store-bought, but tastes so much better that shelf-life is seldom an issue. You may make a few 'flops' the first time or two you try, but they'll all be edible (nay, tasty). Keep at it.

eta: I see (late) you said 'dutch oven'. Just substitute 'dutch oven' where I wrote 'tin'. I've baked many a loaf with a dutch oven (and on a fire rather than an oven) and it works every bit as well.

[fulafel]

Heh, for anyone else wondering: metric cup is actually a thing in some parts of the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_%28unit%29#Metric_cup

[OJFord]

Cups are an absolute nightmare of a measurement system.

In the UK, Imperial (284ml - i.e. 1/2pint), metric (250ml), and 'US customary' (237ml - i.e. 1/2 US pint) are all commonly sold. Less common is them actually telling you which they are.

In fact they mostly only say if they're US (though not stating that isn't a guarantee they're not!) because that's a selling point - people almost exclusively want them for following American recipes, they're rarely used here otherwise.

But for some reason that doesn't stop the others being sold.

Recipes also rarely state which. Or they'll say '250ml' but you suspect they're probably actually just rounding from US cups.

It annoys me out of pedantry and ambiguity, but with my other hat on, I think people care far too much about precision in recipes and following recipes, to the detriment of their cooking. For the sorts of things you're going to use a 'cup' for, being 20% off (Imperial vs. US) is probably fine; obviously more so the more ingredients there are in the recipe that are measured with cups.