No-Knead To Worry

I’ve never been a cool or popular person. At school, I was the quiet student content to be invisible, bury my head in my books and make 1 or 2 very good friends. As I grew into adulthood, I found that I was always late, if ever, in getting on the band-wagon of any trend or anything popular, hence it is now, almost 2 months shy of a year, that I made the much talked, discussed and blogged about No-Knead bread that was brought to us by Mark Bittman, the New York Times’ The Minimalist.

But this post and column is about a lot more than the No-Knead bread, it is about me journeying on an emotional safari and discovering things about my cooking self. I’ve found that I can be over confident, impatient, self-doubting, resolute and yet humble enough to learn lessons. You’ll have to click here for the column to read more and see how these traits manifest themselves.

So, what have I been making that caused this emotional outpouring? Guava jam, guava cheese and for the first time, the vaunted No-Knead bread. Easy, right? Click here and tell me that you don’t see yourself in someway in this column.

The jam and cheese process starts by first peeling and slicing ripe guavas.

Then boiling them and rubbing and pushing the soft pulp through a sieve.

After a little over an hour and a half, one has jam

A little over two hours later and you have guava cheese.

And finally, the bread; there has been enough waxing and waning about this bread and nothing new that I can add to make it more alluring. Here’s what I will say, if you like a crusty, artisan, chewy bread, then this is it. This is the bread for you. It was so good the first time that I made it again the very next day!

Eating the guava jam with this bread was bliss with so many experiences - the crunch of the crust, the chewiness of the texture, the aromatic fruity sweetness of the jam that sunk into the pockets of the bread. Life never tasted so good.

You can click here for the recipe or log on to Jim Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery for the recipe and more.

If you haven’t tried making the bread yet, no-knead to worry, you can wait for a year like I did and then try it :))