Making Bread on the Boat

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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. 

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2 thoughts on “Making Bread on the Boat

    • Hi Dave, No, but I just took a look at it. It might be worth looking at for the boat. I suspect our oven uses a lot of propane, an outback oven might be more economical. We will have how making bread impacts trips to fill our tanks, time will tell!

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