Sorry folks, but my Yahoo 360 experience is drawing to a close. To anyone who may be interested at all, I've started my own website complete with blog. See you there!

BW

This is the best rant on Starbucks... ever. Apparently from a "real" Starbucks barista. Best line:

"11. Keep your f+cking $1200, four-foot-wide Bugaboo stroller out. Of. The. Store."

Get it here.

So I've been tweaking with the no-knead bread recipe to see if I can make one that's using more multigrain flour (fibre is good for you, right?). So I've done a few tries with this recipe and it's been a hit.

Next variations would be to try an Olive Bread. Heck, I might take the plunge and try to make my own sourdough starter (but eeek, we're getting into expert bread making territory here...)

Recipe: No-Knead Multigrain Bread

Adapted from New York Times recipe and Jim Lahey (Sullivan Street Bakery)

Yield: 1 loaf.

Total mixing/prep time: approx. 10 minutes
Total time (including rising time): 14 to 24 hours

Hardware (Special equipment):

· Mixing bowl

· Baking sheet

· Parchment paper

· Metal baking pan

· Baking/pizza stone

Software (Ingredients):

· 2 cups Robin Hood “Best for Bread” Multigrain flour

· 1 cup Robin Hood “Best for Bread” Homestyle White flour

· ½ tsp. instant or rapid-rise yeast

· 2 tsp. salt (increase to 3 tsp. if using kosher salt such as Diamond Crystal)

· 1 ½ cups + 2 tbsp. room temperature water

· Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt. Add water and stir by hand or with a wooden spoon/spatula until blended; the “dough” will be shaggy and sticky. Make sure you get to the bottom of the bowl and ensure that all the flour is hydrated. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.

2. Let dough rest at room temperature (about 70 degrees) for at least 12 hours, preferably about 18 hours. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles and gluten (long strands that cling to sides of bowl when tilted) is well-developed.

3. Lightly flour work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle dough lightly with a little more flour and stretch into a rectangle. Fold it over as if folding a business letter – fold the bottom 1/3 up, then fold the bottom 1/3 down. Repeat again by folding it over in the opposite direction. Cover with original bowl and let rest covered for 5 to 15 minutes. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface and to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Line baking sheet with parchment paper and sprinkle cornmeal or wheat bran where loaf will be placed. Put dough seam-side down parchment-lined baking sheet and dust with more wheat bran or cornmeal. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 2 to 3 hours. When ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. Place metal baking pan on oven floor and pizza/baking stone on lowest rack setting in over. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, preheat oven to 475 degrees. When dough is ready, transfer baking sheet with loaf and bake directly on baking/pizza stone. Quickly add a tray of ice cubes to the metal baking pan – this will create steam in the oven to create the nice crust. Bake at 475 degrees for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, reduce heat to 450 degrees and transfer loaf directly to the pizza/baking stone. Add more ice cubes while over door is open. Bake another 25-30 minutes or until loaf is a dark brown colour. Internal loaf temperature should be 210 degrees F when checked with an instant read thermometer (my Williams-Sonoma digital meat thermometer works well too, cleaned of any residual meat of course). Remove from oven and cool bread on a rack.

In my last entry, I mentioned that baking bread at home can be done with a little knowledge and a little patience. Convinced that "The Bread Bible" was going to be another volume added to my cookbook collection, I started poking around the Internet to see what recipes I could find from the book while I tried to find the book at some discount store like BookCloseouts.com (which I highly recommend BTW). Along the way, I found recipes for a few of the breads I've tried, including Basic Hearth Loaf and Butter-Dipped Dinner Rolls. I also stumbled across an interesting blog of someone actually making every recipe in The Bread Bible and documenting each loaf. Fascinating read.

The accidental discovery of Rose Levy Beranbaum's blog was what led me to a truly extraordinary recipe. In this blog entry, Rose mentions an article from the New York Times about a bread that requires no kneading. Intrigued, I checked out the original article that is accompanied a short video clip demonstrating the recipe details. I was floored. Could it be that simple? You mean an 8-year-old kid could make this bread? Maybe I should try it... so I trekked into the kitchen and started that night. The next morning, I had a very wet dough with lots of bubbles - by the afternoon, it was rising nicely as a round loaf. By dinnertime, I had exactly what Rose pictured in her blog entry. My wife and I were floored... "You made this?" she asked. "Yes, and it honestly took no more than 5 minutes of labour."

So now I'll share with you my adapted recipe from the NYT article (as a reference, you can get to the original article here, with the video available here). The original article restricts access to the recipe to those who have registered at the NYT website, but it's also reprinted here in another newspaper.

My variations:

• I used 1 1/2 cups water, not 1 5/8 cups - this is the quantity used in the video
• I shaped it into a round loaf and used cornmeal instead of wheat bran. When I first tried this, I used the towel method for the 2nd rise, but in a subsequent attempt, I used a sheetpan lined with parchment and covered in cornmeal, covering the top of the loaf with more cornmeal and plastic wrap (one less potential messy handling of the dough)
• Sadly, I lack a large enough baking vessel as used in this recipe. But following some of the techniques I used previously in The Bread Bible and from Rose's blog entry, I simply used a sheetpan placed on top of my pizza stone. If you don't have a pizza stone (which are on clearance at Loblaws for anyone who's looking for one under $5), you can use another sheetpan, but make sure you preheat your oven for a good 20-30 minutes before baking. However, I did see a nice ceramic pot at Wal-Mart the other day for a low low price of $10 - I may have to invest in one to try this recipe to the max. I also used a pan filled with ice cubes at the bottom of my oven to create steam required for that all important crunchy crust.
• I baked this at 475 degrees for 20 minutes, then transferred it directly onto the pizza stone for another 20 minutes at 450 degrees. While the oven was open, I added some more ice cubes/cold water to the pan.

This has inspired me to try other variations on this recipe:

• replacing the bread flour in this recipe with whole wheat or multigrain flour (Robin Hood makes a "Best for Bread" multigrain flour that I think can be replaced cup for cup with white flour). I may have to up the yeast to 1/2 tsp and and 2-3 tablespoons more water as these flours tend to absorb more water. Or at least some combination of multigrain flour and bread flour (2 cups multigrain to 1 cup bread flour)?
• olive bread (kneading 1/4 cup of coarsely chopped pitted olives before the 2nd rise)
• chocolate walnut bread (kneading some good Lindor dark chocolate bits and walnuts before the 2nd rise)

Here are some pictures from my recent multigrain loaf. The combinations could go on and on. But the big advantage is that you can make in your own home artisan bread that I would normally pay $3-5 at your local market for a fraction of the cost and labour. Yes, it requires patience and some planning but I think a new weekend tradition will be baking homemade bread.