Good-bye G-ma, Hello No-Knead Bread

This week we bid good-bye to grandma, who took the train up north to visit my sister. She is expecting baby number towards the end of the month, and my mom will help her and enjoy spending time with them and JT's cousin, LT. The kiddo and I got up insanely early to take g-ma to the train station, which was quie beautiful in the early morning.
JT was quite sad, and he would have preferred to take the train to visit his cousin as well. So this week he has been speaking in baby-talk quite a bit, but otherwise seems mostly unscathed.

Before g-ma left, she bought me a birthday present: a nice cast-iron pot from Ikea (the color even matches my smaller LC pot), since I really wanted to try out the (now infamous) no-knead bread recipe originally posted at NYTimes that has since circled the foodie-blogosphere. Together we watched the video that originally accompanied the recipe, and then set out to make it.

First, we measured out the flour, using the scoop and dump method. I wasn't quite paying attention, so I am not sure we actually got the 3 cups of flour that we needed.

Then we added the salt (about 1 tsp), and looked for the yeast. At that point, we discovered that we were out, which was not in the plan - I had decided in the sake of not-having-any-money-left-until-next-paycheck that we would not go to the grocery store until the weekend and just eat what was in the fridge and cupboard. That was working fine (we had spaghetti with homemade sauce, using a can of tomatoes, an onion, and the leftover carrots and one zuchinni that were all alone in the crisper drawer; we also ate bean soup made from dried beans and adding a cup of the sauce and another onion, some paprika, cumin and red pepper; and this morning we ate homemade oatmeal and some cereal with re-constituted powdered milk), but we were out of fruit, too, so the kiddo and I took a detour to the library, the store, and the Goodwill, where I bought 2 plates and a bowl, since several dishes have mysteriously broken lately. Well, perhaps not so mysteriously. So, later that day, we returned and added 1/4 tsp instant yeast and 1 1/2 cups water. At this stage, I should have realized that the dough was much too goupy (soupy?), but since we followed the video and mixed with our hands, we just had too much fun.

So, after leaving the dough to rest (covered with plastic) overnight (close to 24 hours), we dumped it out, and it was sticky, sticky, sticky. It did not easily fold over like in the video, but sort of glopped around. But we carried on, wrapped it in a flour-covered towel, and let it rise for about 2 hours. But it didn't get much bigger, and then I had to scrape it from the towel to drop into the preheated (450 degrees) pan. So at least half the dough remained on the towel, another 1/5 had been washed away after the hand-mixing (twice), and the dough was small. I was pretty sure that the bread would be terrible, but then after about 30 minutes of baking with the lid and 10 without, a tiny loaf of bread emerged.

And it was pretty tasty. Sort of like a baguette in texture. Next time I will:

a. add more flour or less water and check for a less runny texture during the first step.

b. add some beer or vinegar to replace a bit of the water so there is a bit more flavor.

and c. replace some of the white flour with wheat.

Because even though I had to "pour" the dough into the pot, the final result was bread with a crispy crust and airholes throughout.