No-knead sourdough bread with steel-cut oats

When we first arrived to Canada, we encountered several disappointments. By far, the biggest one were the washing machines. Back then, the front loaders had not made the voyage across the big pond yet. So we were sentenced to destructive 20-minute top-loader cycles. I can say that pretty much every European we have met shared our dismay.

At the top of the list of disappointment were potatoes and bread. Since this is a food blog, potatoes will earn their own post of three, in due time. Today, we focus on bread.

Truthfully, good crusty bread was available in Waterloo, just that the supermarkets in walking distance from our place didn't carry it. You had to know about the little German bakery, make a trek there, and empty your bank account for a loaf of bread.

This started my quest, I was determined to make good bread at home. Years had passed, I got good in making wheat-free soda bread, we discovered very good heavy 100% rye bread and so on. The art of proper home-made bread eluded me until my friend Walt pointed me to a NY Times article with a recipe for no-knead bread.

That was a true revolution! The bread came out of the oven crackling, to quote the same friend Walt, who also supplied me with a container of wonderfully aged sourdough starter. I tried several recipes from breadtopia.com, and our staple soon became sourdough bread with steel cut oats.

Quite a sight, ha? And so trivial to make. Even my mom admitted the no-knead method was far superior and much less work than anything she had tried. My mom can and does bake very well!

Put 1/2 cup of steel-cut oats in a large bowl. I like to use a glass bowl because my plastic wrap sticks much better to glass than it does to steel. Add 12 oz of warm water and stir. If you heat the water too much, you will kill the yeast in the starter. Add some sourdough starter, and mix it all well with a Danish dough whisk if you have one. If you don't have one, it is $8 very well spent.

I hear you screaming. HOW MUCH SOURDOUGH STARTER? The breadtopia dude, who I think really knows what he is doing, uses 1/4 cup of sourdough, or 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast if you do not have sourdough. I definitely suggest one does not use more than 1/4 tsp of instant yeast, otherwise the bread will taste very yeasty. Jasna will confirm that from suffering through my early attempts. Sourdough starter, at least mine, is much more forgiving. I usually eyeball it, and am pretty generous, often using a cup of starter. I suggest you start with 1/4 cup and then experiment. Starters do differ, and you may not want your bread to be super sour. My starter is nicely aged - I have had it for about 5 years, and Walt claimed it was already 40 years old when he gave it to me. It has a mellow flavor, a nice hint of sourness, and is super vigorous, so I just love using it.

Danish dough whisk

I have never heard of a Danish dough whisk until I watched videos on breadtopia.com. It really looks like a bent hanger, and I bet you can make one yourself. I started out without it, then I saw it was $8 and bought it immediately. The whisk makes mixing of the stiff batter much easier. Additionally, it must be one of the geekiest kitchen gadgets, so everyone should definitely have one. Just imagine the powerful impression you are making on people visiting your kitchen.

Back to making bread! We just mixed water, steel-cut oats, and a mysterious amount of sourdough starter. Now we add a combination of flours. I like to use 1.5 cups of white flour and 1.5 cups of gluten free flour I buy in Costco. I like the gluten-free flour for its flavor - it is a mix of a variety of bean flours, and potato starch, and probably more interesting things. Sometimes I use 1.5 cups of buckwheat flour, and sometimes I use 1.5 cups of rye flour. You get the pattern - 1/2 of the flour is white, and one can play with the rest. All together 3 cups of flour works well.

Add 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt, and stir everything using the geeky dough whisk. When everything is nicely incorporated, you are done. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap, place it somewhere cool, and wait.

The dough after 12 or so hours

After 8 to 18 hours you will be ready to work the dough, have it rise again, and then bake. At that point, you need about 2 hours of time. You'll be busy maybe for 20 minutes during that time, but you have to finish the bread. Well, you could do the second rise in the fridge and make things even more flexible.

Note that the rising time really depends on the temperature, your sourdough, humidity and so on. For me, overnight seems to work perfectly.

I flour the surface of my giant cutting board pretty thickly: I usually use 3 heaping tablespoons of flour that I spread with the back of the spoon across a large rectangular area on the board. Then I place the risen dough from the bowl right in the middle of the flour. The dough will be like a thick mud, so I add another tablespoon or two of flour on the top and smear it around. I stretch the dough into a rectangle and fold it. I repeat that a couple of times - this is an important step because this helps with gluten creation. I suggest watching the breadtopia dude how he does it, and then find your own way.

After a few foldings, I knead the dough ball it until I use up all the flour I put on the board. The dough is fairly wet, so it picks up the flour pretty fast. This is just my way of using up the flour and minimize the cleanup.

Lightly grease another bowl. The one that you used for rising will be dirty. Shape the dough into a ball, and stretch and fold the ball a few times. The dough then goes in the bowl, cover it with plastic wrap for the second rise.

The second rise will take between 1 to 2 hours. For me it is always about an hour, maybe a little less. In about 30 minutes I start preheating the oven to 500F, along with a heavy pot with a lid. Make sure that the pot and the lid can take the 500F temperature. Glass lids often cannot handle that kind of temperature and may shatter. I usually use a cast-iron pot because it retains the heat very well, but I have had very good results using regular pots.

Preheating will take some time. If the oven doesn't go all the way to 500F, I suggest cranking it as high as you can.

When the dough doubles in size, it is baking time! With your kevlar oven mitts, take the pot out of the oven, close the oven door, remove the lid, and fold in the dough. Make sure that the surface you put your pot on can take the high heat. A wooden cutting board is a good choice. Make some cuts in the dough so that your bread is pretty. Here is what I do:

Cover the pot, put it back in the oven, and set the timer to 30 minutes. The wet dough will generate steam inside the covered pot and the effect on the crust will be the same is it is in commercial oven where they steam the bread while it bakes.

When the 30 minutes are up, remove lid from the pot, reduce the heat to 450F, and bake for another 15 minutes.

I usually put the lid somewhere out of the way - remember, it is VERY hot - and put a towel on it, reminding myself that I must not pick the lid with my bare hands. If you have kids, the lid, and later the pot are not something they should be able to get close to.

After 15 minutes, the bread is done! Turn the pot over and the bread will fall out very nicely and easily. The pot should not need any significant cleaning.

Cool the bread on a rack and then eat it. Jasna and I cut the loaf in smaller chunks and freeze them. After thawing the bread will taste great.

Addendum!

This remains my favorite bread recipe. However, I changed it a little bit, so let me record the ingredients and the procedure, briefly.

• In a large bowl mix:
• 1 cup steel cut oats
• 14 oz warm water
• 1 cup sourdough starter (you can use less) or 1/4 tsp of instant yeast
• Add 3 cups of all-purpose flour or bread flour, preferably with high protein content
• Add 1 to 1.5 tsp salt
• Mix well, preferably with your geeky Danish dough whisk
• Cover with plastic wrap, let rise in a cool place for 8-18 hours or so, until the dough approximately doubles in volume
• Turn on a well floured surface, stretch and fold the dough a few times, knead in the flour from the board. Use enough flour to prevent the dough from sticking to the board.
• Put the dough-ball in a greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, let rise until it doubles in volume, for about an hour or so.
• In about 30 mins put a heavy pot with a lid in your oven, set the heat to 500F. Make sure the pot and the lid can take such heat. If needed, a lower temperature will work, but you may need to adjust the baking time.
• When the dough has about doubled in size, place the dough into the preheated pot, score the dough with a paring knife, cover with the lid, and bake for 30 minutes. Use heavy duty gloves/mitts. 
• Remove the lid, reduce the temperature to 450F, bake for 15 minutes.
• Turn the bread out the pot, cool on a rack.

Addendum 2!

Last year we acquired a grain mill. Sounds excessive? Maybe 😊

We did some reading and realized that commercial flours, including whole wheat ones, are processed quite heavily and depleted of many nutrients. That made us think, even though our bread and flour consumption has been quite low. The second part of our motivation was that we wanted flours that are hard to purchase - quinoa, millet, split pea, beans, lentils, ...

So we took a plunge and after almost a year, I am still certain that was a good decision. Aroma of freshly milled wheat is something everyone should experience! The flavor of our bread went up quite a few notches. Probably the most impressive change is in pizza dough - not just the flavor, but also the consistency of the dough is out of this world, despite being whole wheat.

We adjusted our bread recipe to used whole wheat flour. We still use 3 cups of flour, which we obtain from milling 2 cups of grains. The usual combination includes 1.5 cups of hard winter wheat berries, either red or white. The remaining 1/2 cup is what we play with. The most popular choice seems to be millet, but we also use quinoa or buckwheat.

We also upped the amount of steel cut oats to 1 cup. I tried that once as an experiment, looking for adding more fiber to our bread. The result was, in opinion, superior, so 1 cup of oats is the new standard.

Addendum 3 (May 2020)

The next iteration of this recipe is 100% rye bread. For a while we stopped baking bread because we had to go gluten free. The go-to recipe for that period were gluten free muffins. Super tasty, but we missed the bread crust. When we were able to relax our diet somewhat, we tried 100% rye bread with such good result that we make it regularly now. We buy a large bag of rye berries, they mill really easily, and the taste is anything but the bitterness I remember from rye bread. We also switched feeding our sourdough starter with rye only, and the started has been doing just fine.

The main difference seems to be that the dough is wetter. I may need to play with the amount of liquid - but so far, the wetness of the dough has not cause an issue.

Summary:

• 12 oz of warm water
• 1 cup rye sourdough starter
• 3 cups of 100% rye flour, highly recommended to mill it freshly from 2 cups of rye berries
• 1-2 tsp salt
• 1 cup oats, steel cut are the best, rolled work too
• First rise: Mix everything up in a large bowls, cover with plastic wrap, let sit for 24 h
• Add some more rye flour, about a cup or more, mix/knead the dough in the same bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise for another 1-2 hours
• Place a covered pot in the oven, heat to 500F
• Place the dough in the pot, make a few slits, place the cover on the pot, and bake for 30 minutes at 500F
• Remove the cover and bake for additional 15 minutes at 425F
• Cool in a rack. Eat. Slice and freeze what you have not finished in a day.

Addendum 4 (August 2021) - 72h rise whole grain walnut bread

Gluten remains a challenge, so we have largely been making stove-top gluten-free flatbread: Millet and buckwheat flours have worked really well. But, we missed regular bread so I started to poke around: I read that gluten tended to be much less of a problem in Europe, and a speculation was that it was because the wheat had not been that heavily modified, and that it had less gluten. So my interest turned to less or not modified grains such as spelt, kamut, emmer, enikorn which apparently have a different kind of gluten or sometimes less gluten. Then I came across articles (example)  mentioning that long cold rise resulted in shorter gluten strands, making the bread easier to digest. And of course, the one and only Kenji Lopez-Alt, has already posted about his experimentation with long rise.

So I gave it a shot, and the result so far has been very encouraging. The bread is beyond tasty, and it appears to be much less troubling, if troubling at all, when it comes to our gluten sensitivity. Here is what a four-days affair looks like:

1. Feed the starter: mix 1 part water, 1 part water, weight wise, and add 25% weight wise of sourdough starter. Cover loosely and let rise at the room temperature for about 24h. This gives you levain.
2. Mix together the following:
1. 500g flour, freshly milled. Einkorn and emmer have worked best for us, both flavor wise, and gluten sensitivity wise, with eiknorn becoming our favorite.
2. Add 8-10g salt and mix it with the flour.
3. 300-350g cold filtered water
4. 150g levain
5. Optionally: 1/2 cup steel cut oats. 
3. Fold the mixture a bit, it will start developing some strength.
4. Transfer to a bowl (oiled, optionally, or use the same bowl), cover with a lid or plastic wrap, and let rise in your fridge for about 72h. 
5. Take the dough out of the fridge, and leave it to reach about the room temperature.
6. Knead in a handful or two or walnuts, and optionally add more flour if the dough is too wet to knead.
7. Let rise for about 2h, it should about double in size.
8. About 45 mins before the bread is ready, preheat the oven with a heat-proof pot and lid to 500F. I used an cast-iron dutch oven.
9. When the bread is ready and oven and pot pre-heated, fold the bread some more, put it in the pot, and bake covered at 500F for 30 minutes.
10. Uncover the pot (use oven mitts!) and bake uncovered at 425F for another 15 minutes.
11. Cool the bread on a wire rack, and exercise restraint when eating it.