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.

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.