king arthur's no knead crusty bread baked as they suggest in a le creuset -- or dutch oven
Dough was super wet and as a result, it was basically impossible to shape this guy. I would say that I should follow the weight directions for the water as well as the flour if that's the approach to the recipe I'm going to take, because I suspect that's where this guy went off. But thanks for the thoughts!
I use a scale, 450g flour to 300 water to 60ish of 100% hydration whole wheat starter. Rise for 4-8 hrs fridge overnight shape let it sit for an hour while the oven preheats to 500 then bake 20 covered 20 uncovered for crust Idk if you used starter or powder yeast but it’s easy to confuse dough that’s overisen with dough that’s too wet. Over risen dough will still taste ok when it’s baked but the bubbles will often be tiny or huge pockets depending on when in the over rise you bake but I think the biggest thing you will see is that it’s impossible to shape. If you look online you can see videos of people shaping 100% hydration doughs so if it’s properly risen it’s possible to do but if the gluten breaks down too much then that stops being true.
You can let it rise in the fridge for a couple days but I don’t really think 7 days is reasonable. My starter gets too weak and inconsistent if I feed it only once a week and keep it in the fridge so I wouldn’t recommend more than 48 hrs and even then it’s probably sensitive to what shelf you got it on. Maybe I’m slow but it took me 3-5 years to really figure out how to get decent bread it really is quite hard but seems so easy once you get there.
UPDATES: I re-made this dough as the whole recipe and weighing EVERYTHING out. The loaf pictured above I let cold rise for a full 24+, the recipe says you can go til 7 days to get a near-sourdough taste. I will make 1/2 the recipe a few days in and the other 1/2 at the full 7. I will update y'all on whether I can manage to get a nice golden crust (Q) and whether the dough is drier around this time (snoodog). And basically overall progress. Interested to see!
nice crunky boy - might could use a bit more color on it but i'd cronk on that sucker any day
My oven consistently doesn't want to brown the tops of loaves and I don't know if it's a "can't truly get to 450 degrees" thing or what. This was cooked in a high-sided Le Creuset so I suspect that might be part of the problem too. I also think I could've given it up to 5 more minutes, but done was done!