A bread that demands minimal attention, barely more than a pinch of yeast, and an excess of time: perfect for quarantine baking. Photos by Anna Traverse Fogle.
Until recently, I couldn’t have predicted this moment: I walk out onto the front porch, having received a text message from a friend, and find waiting at the top of the steps a cleaned jam jar filled with active dry yeast.
Alongside all the world-shifting, disastrous strangenesses of now sit smaller domestic oddities. One of the latter being that, in the mad rush for quarantine supplies, all the flour and all the yeast in all the land up and vanished. I heard rumors of a few stores still stocking the stuff, and briefly considered dropping eighty dollars online for a dealer-sized supply, but we’ve stopped shopping in person, and my imaginary bakery remains just that.
As tends to happen in a catastrophe, individual human efforts feel more tender, more fragile, more noble. Watching online grocery supplies of both all-purpose flour and yeast dwindle to nothing, I find myself imagining an endless row of kitchens ripe with the sour fullness of bread dough rising, then being punched and kneaded like the most nourishing, most fleeting of all stress balls. I love this vision, that so many people have retreated into their homes and gone back to basics, learned new skills or relearned forgotten ones.
Our yeast gets used in two primary ways: making pizza dough for Friday family pizza nights, and slopping together bread dough. This latter is a recipe I’ve been futzing around with, as have many, many, many other home bakers, since it first appeared in The New York Times way back in a 2006 article by Mark Bittman, describing the process employed by Jim Lahey of New York’s Sullivan Street Bakery.
Over the years I’ve made I don’t know how many variations on the recipe, which is really more of a spell — an alchemy of weird, messy, and wrong, then suddenly perfect. I have mixed all-purpose flour with whole-wheat flour, buckwheat flour, rye flour, and gluten-free flour. I’ve folded in walnuts; mixed in herbs; washed the crust with egg white and sprinkled it with sesame seeds. I’ve neglected the dough longer than intended. I’ve split the pile of dough into two smaller loaves when the Dutch oven went missing after a move. The bread never complains. Neither do the people eating it.
These days, the bread is all the more perfect. It uses only a quarter-teaspoon of yeast. It’s endlessly adaptable. This recipe uses a nonsensical mix of flours, reflecting what I tossed into our most recent loaf in an effort not to deplete our supply of any one variety. It happened to work quite well — crusty from the Dutch oven, with a springy, giving crumb, and a deep, full flavor from the long, slow rise and the mix of whole-grain and more refined flours.
Plus: This recipe uses time as an ingredient. Which makes a lot of sense for people spending nearly all their time at home.
Quarantine Bread
Ingredients:
- 1 cup each all-purpose flour, gluten-free flour, and whole-wheat flour (Note: Again, this mix of flours doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's what was on hand and it worked. Experiment freely.)
- ¼ teaspoon instant (not rapid-rise) yeast
- 1 ¼ teaspoons salt
- 1 5/8 cups room-temperature water
- Combine the flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl. Stir in the water until blended. It will look like a total mess. Don’t worry: Just cover it up with plastic wrap or a towel and forget about it all day or all night — at least 12 hours, and up to 18.
- When the dough has risen to twice its original size (or thereabouts) and it looks alive, ease it out onto a lightly floured surface, dust it with a little more flour, and fold it around. Don’t knead it. That’s not what we’re here for. Just gently manage it.
- Shape it into a rough ball, sprinkle a towel with flour, and put the dough onto the floured towel, covering it with a second towel. Let it hang out while you make breakfast, read a magazine, walk the dog — a couple hours.
- Heat the oven to 450, and as you do, heat your Dutch oven within it, lid on. Ease the dough into the heated Dutch oven (take its lid off first), seam side up; if you’re sprinkling with egg white or seeds or whatever, now’s the time. Don’t freak out when it looks like a swamp monster.
- Bake with the lid on for half an hour, then with the lid off for another 15 minutes. Remove. Cool as long as you can stand to, but no longer. Tear in.
