Whole Grain No-Knead Bread

I have a favorite no-knead white bread, but I am always on the hunt for something to complement it. A friend recently gifted me Smitten Kitchen's newest cookbook (I squee'd!) and when I read my way through it, I found that Deb had given me that gift of a new no-knead bread! The more I read the recipe, the more excited I became. But I decided to give it a test go while I still have a little bit of spare time to know whether it works and if I like it.

Planning!

I decided that I'd do open-faced shrimp salad sandwiches for my lunches this week, starring this bread, then freeze the other half of a loaf to toast up for breakfasts down the road. Since I was doing my big prep day on Sunday, but also had most of Monday off, I would start the bread on Saturday, and bake it on Monday, leave Sunday for the big cooking projects.

Here's the nutritional breakdown from Fitbit...

Assuming that I could slice the loaf into 12 equally sized slices, it might work out for breakfasts for two separate weeks, or, in the cast of this week, 6 slices to freeze, and 6 slices for 3 days of open-faced sandwiches!

Groceries I had on hand...

• granulated sugar
• yeast
• dark rye flour
• whole wheat flour
• AP flour
• kosher salt
• buttermilk (I doctor up whole Lactaid with apple cider vinegar)
• rolled oats

Groceries I had to buy...

• 7 grain hot cereal (1 bag @ $3.39)
• beer (1 big bottle @ $2.99 + .05 bottle deposit)

Total monies spent for the entire recipe: $6.43

Total monies spent for each of these 12 slices....

$0.53 per slice.

Cooking!

This was an insanely easy no-knead bread, which is exactly what I wanted.

just a little sugar and yeast waiting to activate

leave it alone to grow

nice foam!

dry ingredients. so many dry ingredients.

plus beer and buttermilk

I stirred exactly 20 times as directed

okay, goodbye for two days then!

my clingwrap doesn't cling to this bowl, so I'm gonna set a potlid on this to really seal it down

resting

two days later: FERMENTASTIC

like, it's practically a batter more than a dough

sprinkled those oats on top...

got it up to temp, though it took 2 hours, not the 90 minutes suggested by the recipe!

so dark, so dense!

What surprised me in the end but shouldn't have was how dense it is. The word "dense" is in the recipe title, so this is my bad. But I was super surprised. I'm not against it. It's just the opposite of what I'm always striving to achieve with bread. It almost tasted like... and I don't mean this as a pejorative... "health" bread. I'm going to keep eating it this week to decide whether it's going into my rotation.