Bread baking is healthy. I actually had a not-so-great work week. OK, it was more than not great. But then I baked some bread (more of my slightly sweet no-knead, bake in a cast-iron–pot “breakfast bread”) and I instantly felt better. It’s the little things.
Ingredients
3 cups all purpose flour, plus 3 tablespoons for rolling and dusting
2 teaspoon instant yeast
1 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons brown sugar
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup dried dates, chopped
1 1/2 cups water, between 100-115F
1/4 cup liquidy honey, plus more for brushing on after baking
Directions
Start with a large bowl and a wooden spoon, and add your flour to the bowl. Add the yeast, salt and brown sugar. Add the dates and walnuts to the flour mixture and toss well to coat, and to make sure they’re distributed evenly throughout.
Measure the water. Make sure the water is at room temperature (110-115F). Add the honey to the water and stir with a fork to combine. Pour the water in and stir with a wooden spoon. The dough will be rough and a bit sticky, but that’s normal. Stir until all the flour is combined. There’s no kneading involved in this recipe, so you don’t need to be too concerned about the appearance of the dough at this point. Just make sure the ingredients are combined well.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Place the bowl in a warm, draft-free place and let it rise for 10-12 hours. You can put it in the fridge for part of this time; I usually do for the first 6-7 hours. After the dough has risen to double in size, preheat oven to 450F. Place your Dutch oven with the lid on in the cold oven and let it heat up with the oven.
Place a piece of parchment paper on the counter and dust it with flour. Rub flour on your hands and scrape the dough away from the sides of the bowl, gathering it in your hands as best you can (it may feel kind of fluid and not at all like regular bread dough) and forming it into a circular loaf on the parchment paper. Don’t worry if it still looks a little rough in places. This lends to the rustic look of this loaf.
Once you have it shaped, the dough needs to undergo a second rise (much shorter than the first). Sprinkle flour over the top of the loaf and loosely cover it with plastic wrap to prevent a skin from forming over the dough. The flour also prevents the plastic wrap from sticking to the dough so when you take it off at the end of the rise, it doesn’t disturb the dough and wreck the rustic shape you’ve created. Let the dough rise for about 45 minutes. Your oven will also be preheating during this time (and so will your pot).
Once 45 minutes have passed remove the plastic wrap from the dough and trim the parchment paper into a circle closely around the dough. If it doesn’t look like the dough has risen that much, don’t worry about it. The loaf will puff up a bit when it hits the heat of the oven. Remove the preheated pot from the oven and transfer the dough into the pot as carefully as possible by handling only the parchment paper. Slash the top of the loaf. Place the lid on the pot and return it to the oven for 40 minutes. Then remove the lid from the pot and continue baking for another 15-20 minutes. Remove the pot with bread from the oven and place it on a wire rack to cool. You’ll probably hear it crackling as it cools – this is normal. Brush a little extra honey on the top of the bread now, if desired.
