When I heard about the New York Times “No Knead Bread” recipe, I said to myself, “I wanna try that.” Now, three months after seeing the recipe, I finally had the excuse to make my very first ever loaf of bread.

Pic 1: The dough after bringing all the ingredients together. This was started around 6 pm Friday. I covered it and put it in the oven (which was turned off) to sit overnight.

I pulled the dough out of the oven when I woke up in the morning. It didn’t look like it had risen much in the 14 hours since starting. Our house is between 60* – 64* at night so that might have had something to do with it. I left it out on the kitchen table all the morning.

When I returned around 2 pm, it had risen, but again not by much. I folded the dough. Then Annie suggested heating a cup of water in the microwave for a couple of minutes, then putting the bowl of dough in there to rise. She was right (of course).
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Start a bread dough sponge using flour, water, honey and yeast. Combine a flour mixture containing flour, milk powder and yeast, and then sprinkle that on top the sponge and allow it to ferment for 4 hours. Mix in some softened butter then rest for 20 minutes. Knead in some salt and then allow the dough to rise until doubled, about 1.5 hrs. Turn out the dough and press it down, then let it rise again until doubled, about 1 hr.

Make a filling by boiling some raisins in rum and water, then drain the raisins and reserve the liquid. Melt some butter with brown sugar and cinnamon and set aside.

Roll dough into 1-inch balls, dip them in the butter-sugar mixture and lay them in an angel food cake pan. Sprinkle on some raisins and pecans. Keep layering until all the dough is used up.

Drizzle on any remaining butter/sugar mixture on top. Cover the pan and let the dough rise for an hour.
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Annie made some baked char siu bao last night that are really excellent. We picked up some char siu from the store next to Lion Market on King Rd and Tully. First, cut the char siu into cubes. Dice some onion and sweat it in a frying pan, then add the char siu. Mix in a sauce containing soy sauce, oyster sauce, dark soy sauce, sugar, salt, pepper, and some corn starch as a thickener.

She made a sweet bread dough consisting of flour, bread flour, powdered milk, sugar, yeast, butter, eggs, and water. Brought it together then set it aside to rise. Then she divided the dough up into 50-gram balls.
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Some friends of ours gave us a bag of the starter batter plus a recipe for this “Amish Friendship Bread”. It’s kind of like a chain letter of baking. You get the starter batter which you feed and care for 10 days. On the 10th day you make a huge batch of batter, divide it up into four parts, bake at least one, and give away the bags of remaining batter along with the recipe.

It’s a nice recipe, more like a cake than a bread. It uses instant vanilla pudding to keep it moist, and cinnamon powder for spice. Some enterprising people sell the recipe on eBay but you can find all kinds of variations of the recipe elsewhere online.

Aloha, Nate