Scheduling a tour Modernist Cuisine kitchens near Seattle are catnip for food writers like me. They not only have all the toys, but also industrial versions of all the toys: rotovap machines, freezers, steam ovens, etc. But the thing I remember most about my tour a few years ago was a simple Samsung home oven in the middle of it all. The modernist’s chef, Francisco Migoya, opened the door and pointed to a cast iron pan in the middle of it that was so dark that it didn’t seem to reflect any light.
Amid this treasure trove of nerdy gadgets, he said something like: That forty-dollar pot? This is the best tool you can buy to make good bread at home.
Thanks to this pan and an almost perfect recipe, I now make fantastic breads a few times a week. This is not a boast. The bread I make hardly requires any skill on my part. I was just lucky at what turned out to be the culmination of what you can get by combining culinary sloth and the right tool for the job. Although the internet is full of people obsessed with the leavened dough bread for which they worked as slaves (it’s a complete process), you can make excellent bread with a little time and almost no effort.
The Lodge 3.2-Quart Cast Iron Combo Cooker (also known as “the LCC3”) is where the magic happens. It is a curious animal. Disassembled, the “lid” is also a frying pan, and the bottom is a large pan. Place the first on top of the second and you will have a Dutch oven that, with its two handles, looks a little like a child with a cap on its side. Turn it over so that the pan is underneath and you have an ideal container for baking bread. The breads I make have a lovely dark crust and a beautiful, elastic interior, which is known as crumb. If I bought what I did at a fancy bakery, I would be 100 percent satisfied, every time. Costing $ 50 (only $ 40 on Amazon) and weighing £ 13, the Combo Cooker is so cheap that I occasionally give it away, as long as shipping is free.
A big part of the reason I like it so much is the recipe that makes it shine: Jim Lahey’s flatbread, something that got a big boost with two stories by Mark Bittman in The New York Times, then it was forever enshrined in his own book and Modernist Bread. Instead of requiring a lot of kneading or mixing, time does the heavy lifting. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt, then add water and mix until it forms a dough known as “shaggy dough”. After that, stick on the counter overnight. Make a ball in the morning, let it grow a little, then place it in the preheated Lodge and bake. When I’m at my game, manual work takes about 10 minutes. By waiting for it to come out with that overnight growth, you allow the gluten in the dough to strengthen and the flavors of fermenting yeast to develop, a technique known as autolyse and sleep.
There are still many magic tricks when you switch to the pot. One of my favorites is how, with the dough, it becomes a steam oven, a fetish item among bakers and chefs. With the pan’s relatively tight seal, the steam released from the dough is trapped inside, helping to make the heat transfer to the dough particularly efficient. It is effectively a very stable small oven inside its largest, and keeping the steam inside allows the bread surface to stretch during baking, so that the inside can rise as it cooks.