Write down a tour of the modernist kitchen kitchens near Seattle is a kitten for food writers like me. Not only do they have all the toys, but they have industrial versions of all the toys: rotovap machines, freezers, steam ovens. But what I remember most from my tour a few years ago was a Samsung home oven from Jane Jane, right in the middle of it all. Modernist chef Francisco Migoya opened the door and pointed to a cast iron pot in the center that was so dark that it seemed to reflect no light.
In the midst of this nerdy treasure, he said something like this: That forty-dollar pot? This is the best tool you can buy to make good bread at home.
Thanks to this pot and an almost perfect recipe, I now make fantastic bread a couple of times a week. This is not a braggart. The bread I make does virtually no skill on my part. I was just lucky enough to turn out to be the pinnacle of everything that can be achieved by combining culinary laziness and the right tool for the job. While the Internet is full of people obsessed with the hard breads they heard (it’s quite a process), you can make an exceptional bread with a little time and almost no effort.
The Lodge’s 3.2-quart cast iron combined kitchen (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 sauce pot. Put the first one on top of the second and you have a Dutch oven that, with its two handles, looks a bit like a child with a ball cap on the sides. Turn it over so that the pan is underneath and you have an ideal container for baking bread. The breads I make have a beautiful dark crust and a beautiful, springy inside, which is known as the crumb. If I bought what I did at a luxury bakery, I would always be 100% satisfied. The combined kitchen, which is priced at $ 50 (only $ 40 on Amazon) and weighs 13 pounds, is so cheap that I occasionally give it away as a gift, as long as shipping is free.
An important part of why I like it so much is the recipe that makes it shine: Jim Lahey’s Unbreaded Bread, which got a big boost from a couple of Mark Bittman stories in The New York Times, was then collected forever in his own book and By modernist. Instead of requiring too much kneading or mixing, time makes the grunt work. Combine flour, yeast and salt, then add water and mix until it comes together in what is known as a “hair mass”. Then stick it on the counter overnight. Shape it into a ball in the morning, let it rise a little again, and then put it in the preheated Lodge and cook it. When I’m in my game, manual work takes about 10 minutes. Waiting for it with this rise overnight will allow the gluten in the dough to strengthen and the flavors of the fermenting yeast to develop, a technique known as autolysis and sleep.
There are still a lot of magic tricks left when you switch to the pot. One of my favorites is how, with the dough, it becomes a steam oven, a fetish between bakers and cooks. With the relatively narrow seal of the pot, the steam released from the dough is trapped inside, which helps to make the heat transfer to the dough especially efficient. It is, in fact, a very stable small oven inside the larger oven and keeping the steam inside allows you to stretch the surface of the bread during baking so that the inside rises while it is baking.