The Grant Loaf

I've been using the basic no knead recipe I posted on here for a while. But sometimes I goof and I don't plan accordingly and I run out of bread. I've started thinking about how to deal with that. Flat breads can be done fairly quickly. In a couple of hours you can bang out a stack of tortillas or chapatis and they are awesome. But what if you want something more leavened? Well I came across the following recipe in a bread book labeled, appropriately enough, The Bread Book by Linda Collister and Anthony Blake. Generally I feel as though the book is a bit pretentious but it does have a number of good recipes in it and some helpful advice.

In any event, I was reading through some recipes and came across The Grant Loaf (pg. 44). Its a no-knead, one rise (short at that) bread. You mix the ingredients, put them in loaf pans, let them rise for about 30 minutes or so and bake for another half an hour. So within one and a half hours you end up with bread, not bad.

I modified the recipe from the start as it calls for just whole wheat flour. I've had trouble in the past getting my whole wheat bread to leaven enough (for me personally) and so I cut it 50-50 with unbleached all purpose flour. It was easy to make and came out really well. The next batch I'm going to try just using all unbleached flour, then I'll play around with some proportions. In any event, here's the recipe:

The Grant Loaf

4 - 4.75 C whole wheat flour
2 t salt
2.5 C lukewarm water (I just used cold)
2.5 t dry active yeast
1 t packed brown sugar or honey
2 greased loaf pans (I used butter)

Mix together 4 cups of flour and the salt in a large bowl. Mix the water, honey and yeast together in another bowl and let the yeast bloom (i.e. get all ready to munch on some flour). Once the yeast mixture is all nice and foamy dump it in the dry ingredients and mix. The start adding the reserve flour, about a 1/4 cup at a time, until you get a moist dough that pulls away from the walls of the bowl. Put the dough into loaf pans and cover with a moist cloth. Heat your oven to 400 degrees. Let rise until about a 1/2 inch from the top of the pan (depends: anywhere from 20-40 minutes) and then cook for 35-40 minutes.

Further Notes: I'm not sure what would happen if you let it rise further, something to experiment with certainly. As it is, the crumb is soft and moist and it has a pretty even distribution of gas pockets as you can see from the image.