At home I make a lot of the bread we eat, I use a very simple recipe and unbleached floor from Upper Canada Village. It turns out nicely, but I always make a mess in the kitchen and the clean up is as much work as making the bread.  Clearly a new method is called for.  In-Leng, a running friend from Ottawa recommended a no-knead approach and I have decided to give it a go.  I roughly based what I did on this recipe no-knead dutch oven bread  The basic idea is that you mix up a sticky dough and let it rise for 8-18 hours, knock it back, proof for 30 minutes and then put it in to a preheated dutch oven/large covered pan or casserole for 45 minutes covered and 15 with the lid off at 450F/230C.

To minimize the mess I used a plastic box to mix the dough and just put the cover on the box to let it raise and mature.

 I  used a proofing basket to proof the dough and just tipped it into the pot.  This seemed to go badly, but the results where good.

The bread turned out nicely, the bottom was a bit burnt as the pot was in direct contact with bottom of the oven, I have picked up a trivet to prevent this the next time. 

The crumb was great at the edges, but the centre was a little dense.  This was due to my lack of planning, I gave it 5 hours to raise, 8 or more will solve the problem.

Overall, a great success, for our first attempt, we did not have much of a mess to clean up and a few tweaks will make this easy to do on-board, even at sea.

My proportions were:

600g white unbleached “Super Fine” from Upper Canada Village

Large teaspoon Instant Yeast

Teaspoon Salt

 450-500ml warm water

I will play with adding in wholewheat and granary floors and see how it works.