How To Make No-Knead Bread,guest blogger

 It has been a chilly damp Spring, in my rambling shanty in the woods.  Not really warm enough to turn the furnace on, and  too warm for the woodstove.  Plan C is , uh pardon the obvious, Cooking, canning and baking{ more on this later}.

I have tried this bread a few times, it works for me.  and hope it works for you.

How To Make No-Knead Bread

Faith Durand

6–8 minutes

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You might be thinking that a hearty, rustic loaf of bread like this one — with its shatteringly thin crust and tender, tangy interior — requires special equipment or skills or even a bread starter. Nope, this loaf is the simplest bread we know how to bake at home and it requires no stand mixer, no starter, no special knowledge, and no kneading.

This is a step-by-step guide for the now-ubiquitous no-knead bread. It’s ridiculously easy, and very forgiving. If you’re intimidated by baking ratios, volume vs. weight, baking scales, and kneading, this is a great recipe to start with. It will give you such a delicious loaf with about five minutes of hands-on time and almost no way to mess it up.

What Is No-Knead Bread?

No-knead bread was pioneered by bread baker Jim Lahey and went viral about 10 years ago when Mark Bittman published the recipe in the New York Times. This is just about the simplest kind of bread you can make. You basically throw everything into a bowl and mix it up, then sit around, let the yeast do its work, and bake it. But it’s not just a bread for beginners — those of us who bake frequently also really love this bread. The slow rise gives this bread great flavor, and the baking method gives it an awesome crispy crust. It’s artisan quality with very little effort — that’s why this recipe is so popular!

The recipe I use in this tutorial, by the way, is a slight adaptation of the no-knead bread recipe that appears in the New York Times. This one only takes eight hours to rise, as opposed to the overnight method in the original recipe.

Photo by Joe Lingeman.

For Your Information

• No-knead bread gets its power from a long, slow rise at room temperature. Mix up the dough in the morning and let it sit for at least six hours before shaping and rising for one hour more.
• The bread bakes for 30 minutes covered and 15 minutes uncovered in the Dutch oven.

 Key Steps for No-Knead Bread

• Make a wet shaggy dough. This bread can be mixed entirely by hand — just don’t expect a bouncy ball of bread dough. Instead this wet dough and the long rise combine to develop proteins and gluten without kneading. The dough will be sticky, rough, and bit shaggy, so don’t fret!
• Give it a long rise. A long rise is required for no-knead bread (although you can try our no-knead bread in a hurry in a pinch) with most recipes calling for an overnight rise. Our recipe has a little more yeast and can be ready in as few as six hours. Make sure the dough is covered and in a relatively warm, room-temperature area. I stash mine on top of the fridge on cold winter days.
• Shape on parchment paper into a tight ball. Shaping the dough into a round loaf on a pice of parchment paper makes it easier to load and unload the bread from the oven. You want to make sure you shape the loaf into a relatively tight round in order to get a high rise.
• Bake in a Dutch oven. You will need an oven-safe pot or Dutch oven to bake this bread. We prefer the Dutch oven because its weight holds heat well and keeps the steam created by the bread inside the pot for a crisper crust. Take a look at this post for more alternatives to Dutch ovens for the no-knead bread recipe.

Serving and Storing No-Knead Bread

Once out of the oven, let the bread cool for at least 10 minutes before slicing and serving. Any bread not slathered in butter and devoured immediately should be tightly wrapped and stored at room temperature where it keeps well for about three days. After that? Cut it into cubes for the best croutons of your life.

How To Make No-Knead Bread

Yield: Makes 1 loaf

Ingredients

• 1 pound all-purpose flour (about 3 cups) plus more for sprinkling
  
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water

Equipment

• Large bowl
• Plastic wrap or kitchen towel
• Large Dutch oven with ovensafe lid
• Parchment paper
• Whisk

Instructions

1. Make a wet, shaggy dough. Place the flour, salt, and yeast in a large bowl and whisk to combine. Make a well in the center, and add the water into the well. Stir until it forms a shaggy dough.

2. Cover the dough bowl and let rise for 6 to 8 hours. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel. Set aside in a warm place to rise until doubled in size and bubbly, 6 to 8 hours.

3. Shape the dough and rise for another hour. Lightly flour a piece of parchment paper. Turn the dough out onto it, folding it over on itself at least once while you do so. Quickly shape the dough into a round ball (see this video for basic instructions). Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise for 1 hour more.

4. Preheat the oven and the Dutch oven. About 30 minutes before the hour is up, arrange a rack in the middle of the oven. Place a large Dutch oven with its lid on the rack. Heat the oven to 450°F.
   

5. Transfer the loaf to the preheated Dutch oven.The shaped dough will have risen and nearly doubled in size. Using the parchment paper as a sling, carefully transfer the loaf, still on the paper, to the Dutch oven. If desired, make a slash or shallow cut on the top of the dough with kitchen shears or a sharp knife so that the bread can expand while baking.

6. Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Place the lid on the pot and put it in the oven. (Careful, the lid is hot!) Bake covered for 30 minutes.

7. Uncover and bake for 15 minutes more. Remove the lid and bake for 15 minutes more. You can be extra-sure that the bread is done when an instant-read thermometer inserted in the top or side registers 210°F.

8. Cool and slice the bread. Remove the Dutch oven from the oven and use the parchment paper to transfer the bread to a wire rack. Let cool at least 15 minutes before slicing the bread.
   

Faith Durand is the Editor-in-Chief of Kitchn and the author of three cookbooks, including the James Beard Award-winning The Kitchn Cookbook, as well as Bakeless Sweets.

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth Gilbert the author of "In Praise of the Inner Crone" posted it on Facebook  about 10 years ago. 

I have read it over and over then.   A few days ago someone sent this to me,  "reminds me of your boneheaded, stubborn determination".  I took that as a compliment.  

 

 

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IN PRAISE OF THE INNER CRONE!

OK, we all know about the "inner child", right? The innocent being who still lives inside of us, who needs and deserves love and care, and whom we sometimes have to channel in order to learn self-compassion?

I'm a big fan of the notion of the inner child. It can be a really healing construct. Once, when I was going through a particularly dark season of self-loathing, I taped a sweet photo of myself (age 2) on my mirror, and taught myself that any harm I did to me, I also did to HER. It made me kinder and more tender to myself. Imagining other people's inner children makes me kinder and more tender to them.

So the Inner Child is a good thing.

These days, though, I spend less time thinking about my Inner Child lately, and more time focused on my INNER CRONE — the old lady who lives inside me, whom I hope to someday be.

Because she's a serious bad-ass.

The really old ladies always are bad-asses. I'm talking about the real survivors. The women who have been through everything already, so nothing scares them anymore. The ones who have already watched the world fight itself nearly to death a dozen times over. The ones who have buried their dreams and their loved ones and lived through it. The ones who have suffered pain and lived through it, and who have had their innocence challenged by ten thousand appalling assaults...and who lived through all of it.

The world is a frightening place. But you simply cannot frighten The True Crone.

Some might consider the word "crone" to be derogatory, but I don't in the least. I honor it. The crone is a classic character from myth and folklore, and she often the bearer of great wisdom and supernatural power. She is sometimes a guardian to the underworld. She has tremendous vision, even if she is blind. She has no fear of death, which means: NO FEAR.

I keep a wall of photos of some of my favorite crones, for inspiration. The photo below is of a Ukrainian Babushka who lives in (get this) Chernobyl. There are a group of such women — all tough elderly peasants — who have all recently moved back to the radioactive area around Chernobyl.

You know why they live there? Because they like it.

They like Chernobyl because that's where they came from. They are natural-born farmers. They hated being refugees.They resented being shunted off their land after the catastrophe. They hated living in the shabby and crime-infiltrated and stress-inducing government housing in the city, and they much prefer the independence of living off the land in the most contaminated nuclear site on earth. They have formed a stupendously resilient retirement community there, in what some would call the world's most terrifying landscape.

Is it safe? Of course not. Or, whatever. After 90 years of hard living, what does "safe" even mean? They drink the water. These women plant vegetables in that radioactive soil and eat them. They butcher the wild pigs that scavenge around the old nuclear power plant, and eat them, too. Their point is: "We are old. What do have to fear from radioactivity? At this age? Who cares?"

All they want is their freedom. So they take care of themselves and each other. They cut and haul their own wood. They make their own vodka. They get together and drink and laugh about the hardships of World War II and the evils of the Stalin years. They laugh about everything, then they go outside and butcher another radioactive boar and make sausage out of him.

I would put these women in a Bad-Ass Contest against any cocky young alleged Bad Ass you've got going, and I guarantee you — the Chernobyl crones would win, hands down.

We live in a society that romanticizes youth. We live in a culture where youth is considered a real accomplishment. You look at a seriously powerful classic crone like the woman in this photo and you see foolish we are — to imagine that the young offer much for us to aspire to, or learn from. No wisdom like the wisdom of survival. No equanimity like the equanimity of somebody who plants a garden right on top of a nuclear disaster and gets on with it.

So these days, when my Inner Child gets all fluttery with the panic of living, I just ask myself: " WWMICD?"

"What Would My Inner Crone Do?"

Ask yourself that same question. See what she tells you.

One thing I can promise you she will never say? She will never say: "WORRY.

She will more likely tell you this: "ENDURE."

Hang in there, all you future awesome crones!

LG

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Guest blogger Emma Singer on The 7 cooolest Greek Easter Traditions

With the celebration of Greek Easter being only a a few days away, I though I would share this article.

 

The 7 Coolest Greek Easter Traditions to Incorporate Into Your Own Celebration

Emma Singer

March 20, 2024·4 min read

Many of us will be celebrating Easter on March 31st this year and are already shopping for Easter basket stuffers and gifts. The same isn’t true for folks who follow the Orthodox calendar, however. In Greece, where Orthodox is the main sect, the holiday is always celebrated after Passover and tends to occur a little bit later in spring. (This year, Greek Orthodox Easter falls on May 5.) It also turns out that Orthodox Easter is celebrated slightly differently, so read on for some unique Greek Easter traditions; then, go ahead and incorporate some of them into your own festivities or celebrate twice if you please.

How Is Greek Orthodox Easter Different from Western Easter?

If it’s all Greek to you, we can explain. While both Greek Orthodox Easter and Western Easter celebrate the same miraculous religious event (i.e., the resurrection of Christ), the different sects, Eastern Orthodox vs. Western, do so on a different calendar—the Julian and Gregorian, respectively. According to History.com, the Greek Orthodox holiday always falls on a date determined by the Julian calendar, which was established by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C. based on solar cycles. As such, the dates rarely correspond with the Gregorian calendar, which was created well after by Pope Gregory XIII with the intention of correcting inaccuracies (hence the leap year business). Complicated calendars aside, there are also some slight differences in the tradition—namely due to the standard cultural differences and the ways in which traditions evolve, including different biblical interpretations and some older pagan roots.

1. Baking Tsoureki

Nikolay Tsuguliev/Getty Images

Tsoureki—a sumptuous sweet bread—is an Easter staple in Greece that everyone either makes or buys. You can find it stateside, too, if you know where to look and what to look for. (Hint: it has three braids that represent the Holy Trinity and is sometimes cut into the shape of the cross.) Or, if you have baking ambitions, you can find a recipe here.

2. Dying Red Eggs

Tanjica perovic/Getty Images

The Easter egg tradition is a little darker (literally and figuratively) in Greece. Indeed, pastel-colored eggs are decidedly not a part of the tradition; instead, eggs are dyed a deep red color to symbolize the blood of Christ, with the hard shell of the egg symbolizing his tomb. According to okaycrete.com, these eggs are also key to a common Easter game, in which they are stacked and sometimes cracked to the tune of some religious chanting: “Christos Anesti” and “Alithos Anesti” (i.e., “Christ has risen” and “Indeed, he has”). The person with the cracked egg is considered the loser, while the person with the strong, uncracked egg is said to have good luck for the year.

3. Eating Magiritsa

Darrius Dzinnik/500px/Getty Images

This yummy soup, often simply called Easter soup, consists of lamb offal (i.e., heart, liver, lungs, etc.), dill, onion and green vegetables. It’s typically enjoyed on Holy Saturday, after the aforementioned egg cracking game, and symbolizes the end of the 40 day no-meat fast. It’s a tasty precursor to the next festive culinary event and is intended to gradually reintroduce meat to one’s digestive system. (Psst: You can find a recipe here.)

4. Roasting the Lamb

wsmahar/Getty Images

Soup on Holy Saturday is great, but the lamb feast on Holy Sunday is the bee’s knees—namely because it involves a long lunch of spit-roasted lamb with potatoes, salad and more.

5. Church Bells, Flags and the Tomb of Jesus

kolderal/Getty Images

Here, a more solemn tradition that takes place on Good Friday with church bells ringing and flags flying at half mast. In fact, it’s not unusual for some villages in Greece to create a shrine representing the tomb of Jesus that is carried onto the streets—a religious ceremony that communicates the significance of the occasion.

6. Going to Midnight Church Service

aire images/Getty Images

When Saturday turns into Holy Sunday at the stroke of midnight, church services are held to rejoice in the resurrection of Christ. These celebrations include fireworks and candle vigils; the priests’ candles symbolize the eternal flame and those of the revelers, lit by a priest’s candle, are brought home to make a black cross above the entrance of their home as a blessing.

7. Eating Koulourakia

Steve Outram/Getty Images

Here, a sweet treat to celebrate the holiday: Koulourakia are cookies that are made with grape must, extra virgin olive oil, orange and ouzo. Crisp on the outside and soft within, this prized dessert is a Greek holiday staple.

Guest blogger on Tsougrisma: The Greek Easter Egg Game

It's nearly here!  

Tsougrisma: The Greek Easter Egg Game

 

Wooden spoons and a straw nest holding Greek red Easter eggs. © Provided by Smells Like Delish

Easter celebrations around the world are bursting with unique traditions, and Greece is no exception. A delightful game, known as the Greek Easter egg game, takes center stage, bringing families and communities together for a playful competition steeped in tradition.

This seemingly simple activity, involving bright red dyed eggs and a touch of friendly rivalry, holds deep symbolic meaning and historical roots within Greek Orthodox Easter customs.

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The Heart of Tsougrisma: Cracking Eggs and Sharing Blessings

At the heart of Tsougrisma lies a playful competition. Each participant holds a red-dyed Easter egg, traditionally hard-boiled chicken eggs.

Players then take turns tapping the ends of their eggs against each other, uttering the phrases "Christos Anesti!" (by one player) and "Alithos Anesti!" (Indeed He is Risen! by the other) with each tap.

The goal? To emerge victorious with an unbroken egg! The player with the last unbroken egg is declared the winner and is believed to be blessed with good luck for the coming year.

A Tradition Steeped in Symbolism

The vibrant red color of the Easter eggs is no accident. In Greek Orthodox tradition, red symbolizes the blood of Christ shed on the cross.

The hard shell of the egg represents the sealed tomb of Jesus, and the cracking of the egg during Tsougrisma signifies the triumphant resurrection.

Each tap and response ("Christos Anesti!" and "Alithos Anesti!") echo the core message of Easter: the death and rebirth of Jesus Christ.

A History as Rich as the Red Dye

Shrouded in mystery, the Greek Easter egg game likely stems from both ancient fertility rites (eggs symbolizing new life) and pagan celebrations (tapping eggs representing spring's arrival).

Over time, these elements blended with Christian traditions, forming the unique game enjoyed today.

The red dye was originally onion skins as when steeped to a very dark shade they're a sienna red-orange shade. Modern red Greek eggs tend to use food coloring though.

A Time for Family and Community

While winning Tsougrisma brings bragging rights and a touch of good luck, the true essence of the game lies in its ability to bring families and communities together.

The Easter table becomes a battleground for friendly competition, filled with laughter, cheers, and playful taunts. Children eagerly face off against adults, grandparents challenge grandchildren, and cousins test their egg-tapping skills.

This lighthearted competition strengthens bonds and creates lasting memories.

Playing Tsougrisma: Tips and Tricks (or Not!)

There's no official rule book for Tsougrisma, and perhaps that's part of its charm. However, some time-tested "strategies" (though their effectiveness is debatable) have been passed down through generations. These include:

• The "Strong" Egg: Some may choose particularly strong eggs, hoping they'll withstand the tapping onslaught. However, a thicker shell might not always guarantee victory.
• The "Secret Weapon": Legends abound of players using boiled or dyed quail eggs, hoping their smaller size will give them an edge. Whether this is ethical (or even effective) is a matter of personal Tsougrisma philosophy!
• The "Lucky Charm": Many believe in the power of positive thinking. Holding your egg with confidence and focusing on its strength might just give you a mental edge.

Ultimately, the true joy of Tsougrisma lies in the spirit of the game. Embrace the friendly competition, enjoy the camaraderie, and savor the symbolism behind the cracking of each egg.

Related

• Bunnies to Lambs - The Symbols of Easter
• Dying Eggs With Onion Skins For Easter
• 12 Delicious Uses for Leftover Easter Eggs
• Tsoureki (Greek Easter Bread)

Cracking Open a World of Greek Easter Traditions

Tsougrisma is just one piece of the vibrant tapestry of Greek Easter traditions. To delve deeper, explore these resources:

• Greek Easter: Customs and Traditions (https://realgreekexperiences.com/greek-easter-traditions) offers a comprehensive overview of Greek Easter customs, including Tsougrisma, food, and religious practices.
• The Spruce Eats: Tsougrisma: The Greek Red Easter Egg Game (https://www.thespruceeats.com/greek-easter-egg-game-1705738) provides detailed instructions on how to play Tsougrisma and explains the symbolism behind the game.
• Keep Talking Greece: Greek Easter Eggs symbolism in color and cracking tradition (https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/category/1-news/) explores the significance of the red color and the cracking tradition in Greek Easter celebrations.

So, this Easter, gather your loved ones, dye some eggs a vibrant red, and get ready for a fun-filled round of Tsougrisma. A

s you tap your eggs together and celebrate the resurrection of Christ, remember that the Easter is a time of family, reverence, and celebration with the traditions you love.

The post Tsougrisma: The Greek Easter Egg Game appeared first on Smells Like Delish.

Beyond the delicious feasts and joyous proclamations of "Christos Anesti!" (Christ is Risen!), a delightful game takes center stage: Tsougrisma, also known as the Greek Easter Egg Game. © Smells Like Delish

Closeup on tapping with red Easter eggs playing a game of Tsougrisma, the Greek Easter egg game. © Provided by Smells Like Delish

Closeup on happy mother and daughter having egg tapping with red easter eggs in the house in sunny spring day. © Provided by Smells Like Delish

Greek red eggs for Easter. © Provided by Smells Like Delish

Red Easter eggs and liquid dye. © Provided by Smells Like Delish

Wooden spoons and a straw nest holding Greek red Easter eggs. © Provided by Smells Like Delish