no-knead bread: victory!

At the office! The boss isn't here today because his COVID isolation doesn't end until midnight, so he's missing out on what was, for once, a clear-cut culinary victory. The bread did indeed come out well, and I'm even more convinced, now, that this is a super-forgiving recipe.

The inside crumb of the bread was dense but soft, and the contrast with the crunchy outer crust was exquisite; my choice to paint the outside with two coats of that butter-olive-oil-salt mixture was the right move, although I did need to re-bake the bread this morning to firm up the crust. The bread, at least while it was fresh, was good enough to eat without any extras like butter, hummus, or herbed cream cheese. 

dense crumb, but soft, and the contrast with the butter-painted outer crust was almost focaccia-like

with the dill-garlic-cayenne cheese spread

gotta give some love to the cream-cheese spread (my own dill, garlic, and cayenne)

honest-to-God hummus this time—no cauliflower

This bread will make an appearance on other cheat days. It's very easy to make even if you don't have a Dutch oven. I survived with just a baking tray and a tented tin-foil top. The high-hydration dough, though wet, was firm enough to form something like a perky boule on the bottom of the baking tray. I did, however, follow the recipe's advice to leave a cupcake tin full of water on the lower rack to provide the bread with extra moisture while it did its initial baking. The final 15 minutes of the bake involved removing the water, uncovering the bread, and using my top burner to give the loaf a nice suntan, which I kept even by rotating the bread once. I'm still amazed at how well this worked out. My thanks, again, to my buddy Charles, who gifted me with the oven that makes all this possible.

UPDATE: I had planned to eat the remains of the bread after the other staffers left, but my Korean coworker snarfed up all the leftovers and declared it the best bread he's ever had. He then asked me for the recipe, so I showed him both the English-language recipe online (which he'll have to translate into Korean) and the Jenny Jones video. He took cell-phone pics of the URLs for both the video and the recipe, which I assume he'll look up on his own when he has free time. I'm eager to make this bread again, maybe experimenting by using an actual loaf pan (which I have). After doing this bread once or twice more, I want to move on to Maangchi's sweet roll-bbang, which I'm convinced will work well as hamburger buns.