The Munchies Blog

Not much text required, really: I made bagels (following Anne’s recipe, with 350g high grade flour and 150g organic wholemeal flour) twice in the last week. They’re great. With and without sesame.

I first tried out this recipe two years ago and it was quite a failure. Back then I mistreated the yeast (I think) and didn’t pre-heat the oven. So the failure was entirely my own fault…

About a year ago, a recipe for No-Knead Bread published in the New York Times made its rounds through the foodblogs. I’m usually quite skeptical about these fads, but I did go and have a look at the recipe after reading so much praise about it. The bread is baked in an ovenproof saucepan, which I didn’t have at that time. So I put it aside but never quite forgot about it. Especially here in New Zealand, where it’s so difficult to get hold of nice bread, the promise of doing almost no work and getting something that nice as a result is just too good! One thing that did bother me though was that the bread is yeast-based. I generally prefer sourdough breads. So even when my flatmate bought a nice set of stainless-steel ovenproof saucepans about half a year ago, I didn’t try out the bread recipe.

Yesterday we had pizza for dinner. I used our two-years-past-its-use-by-date dried yeast (Edmond’s activated yeast, to be precise) that my flatmate kept telling me was still perfectly ok to use. I once did use it for a recipe (I don’t remember what it was), which ended in disaster. Since I suspected that some difference between German and NZ yeast might have been to blame, I stuck to my Edmond’s cookbook for the pizza base. And it turned out fairly nice.

Thus encouraged, I decided to finally try my luck with the no-knead bread. I used a variation of the original recipe and changed it further by using oat bran instead of flour to coat the tea towel.

And the result? Oh yum. Just like promised, a nice brown crunchy crust with soft, chewy interior and really great taste. It even almost satisfies my craving for German Brötchen (bread rolls, to give a completely inadequate translation).

Have a look:

Fresh out of the oven.

A bit later when it had cooled down: cut open.

And I even found a recipe for a sourdough version. So I’m going to order some 150-year-old sourdough starter and hope it’ll make it past the biosecurity watchdogs.