Easy awesome bread
Serves 4-6. Estimated preparation time: 18+ hours fermentation, about 10 minutes of actual work. Estimated cost: $1
3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour, sifted (or not)
1 1/4 tsp salt (I like kosher salt, but do yo thang)
1/4 tsp dry activated yeast (yes that's right, just a tiny amount)
1 5/8 cups warm water (yes that's right, a lot of water)
Mix everything well with a spoon, scraping the bottom of the bowl to get everything together. It should have a very stringy, runny, liquidy consistency. Put it in a sealed container at 70 degrees F (21 degrees C) for at least 12 hours, hopefully 18. It will be bubbly. Open it, mix it again with a spoon or fork, and let it sit sealed for another 30 minutes to 2 hours. It will be bubbly again, but less this time.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Put the baking dish (Corning ware, dutch oven, Pyrex, or whatever heavy, thick-walled, non-stick device with a lid that you have at hand) into the oven to get hot during the pre-heat. When the oven is at full temperature, pull out the dish, spray the inner surface with oil and dump the gooey dough in. Spray more oil on the dough's surface to get a crisp crust. Cover and bake for 30 mins. Then, uncover for 15-30 mins, watching the bread for a honey-like golden color. Take out and cool, on a drying rack if you have one.
Serve hot with butter. Unsalted butter tends to be of higher quality.
Notes:
The 'crumb' of this bread is very dense, spongy, moist, and springy. The crust is crackling, almost fried in its crisp crunchiness. If you want a bread shaped more like a Focaccia, more flat in other words, use a large-bottomed baking dish (for this recipe's proportions, no more than 8"x11" interior). If you want something more like a boule, more spherical, use a narrower, taller dish (8" interior diameter, for example), or double the recipe for your larger dish. The former will give you more crust, the latter will give you more moist and spongy insides.
Try sprinkling seeds on top prior to baking. Pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds... Try throwing in some plumped raisins or smashed grapes, or chopped dates or dried apricots, or rosemary or plumped sun-dried tomatoes, prior to fermentation. Just not too much, you don't want to ruin the chemistry.
This bread is at its best, by far, about 10 minutes out of the oven, and up to 4 hours later if wrapped in a kitchen towel in the meantime. If you want to eat it after that, I'd recommend sealing it in an airtight container (aluminum foil, Rubbermaid, Ziploc, etc.) with a generous sprinkle of water, and re-heating it by putting it in the oven at high heat for about 2-4 minutes. This overall treatment will keep the bread moist inside, but then re-crisp the outside crust.
[This recipe was adapted from a New York Times recipe, which itself was adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery.]