I think this might be the 8th or 9th attempt I’ve made at perfecting Almost No-Knead Sourdough and I think that I might have nailed it.  I’ll need to try it a few times more to make sure, and I’d like to ensure that I can substitute half of the white flour for whole wheat flour as well.  But I’m feeling really good about this method and, in the end, the only change I really needed to make was to reduce the resting and rising times.  Who knew? 

Apparently, if you allow sourdough to rest for too long, whatever bonds there are that should keep the dough together sort of disintegrate and the dough turns into a wet, gloppy mess. 

Ingredients
15 ounces all purpose flour (3 cups)
1/4 teaspoon yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
7 ounces water, at room temperature (3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons)
3 ounces mild-flavored lager (1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons), such as Budweiser
1/4 cup sourdough starter
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Instructions
1. Whisk flour, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Add water, beer, starter, and vinegar. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 6 hours.

2. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside 10-inch skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment-lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until dough has double in size and does not readily spring back when poked with finger, about 1 hour.

3. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500*F. Lightly flour top of dough and, using razor sharp blade or sharp knife, make one 6-inch long, 1/2-inch-deep slit along top of dough. Carefully remove pot from oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot and place in oven. Reduce oven temperature to 425*F and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210*F, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.

4. Refresh starter by mixing in 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 water. 



I forgot to put a slit in the bread, so it’s not quite as pretty as my original Almost No-Knead Bread loaf, but that’s an easy fix for next time.  I’m still refreshing my starter with whole wheat flour and that seems to be having a nice effect.  Next time I’ll try replacing half of the flour with whole wheat flour.  The sourdough flavor in this loaf was nice and pronounced. 

I am feeling a bit sheepish that the only thing I really needed to do was change the rising and resting times, but it’s been a fun journey.  It’s nice to finally have achieved something resembling success! 

In theory, if I was more confident in the rising abilities of my starter, I could omit the yeast entirely, but my starter has proven finicky.  Hopefully this will change in time.

Ingredients
For the rub
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup salt
2 tablespoons cumin
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons pepper
1 tablespoon paprika
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 tablespoon coriander

3-4 pounds short ribs
Wood chips (I used pecan.)

Instructions
1. Mix all rub ingredients.  Generously rub over short ribs and let sit at room temperature for an hour. 

2. Smoke at 300*F for 2 1/2 hours or until fork tender.  Shred and serve with barbeque sauce and rolls. 



Comments
This recipe was found at the wonderfully named blog The Food in My Beard.  I was looking for a way to use the short ribs from my pastured cow order and I’ve also been interested in trying out the Big Green Egg as a smoker.  This recipe met both those desires quite well! 

Sadly it’s not very precise, because smoking will depend significantly on your smoking device.  For the BGE this involved getting the coals to the correct temp, adding the soaked wood chips, adding the meat to the grate, closing the lid, and setting a timer.  Very simple. 

The rub and flavor of the meat was simply fantastic.  Sadly, I believe that I neglected to take into account that grass fed cow, being leaner, requires a shorted cooking time and it was a bit overcooked.  We dubbed the results “cow bacon.”  That said, the process was pretty easy, the rub was great, and our next smoking experiment will be a nice beef brisket.  Yum.

Over the years I’ve had many friends ask me for advice on learning to cook and where to start.  While creating your own recipe is great, I find that cooking with a recipe is the best place to start until you train yourself to recognize what techniques work and how to use different ingredients.  This primer should give you the tools you need to effectively use every recipe you encounter.  

1. Read the recipe
This is the most important part of cooking from a recipe yet it’s a step that I still manage to screw up from time to time.  It’s also a step that you’ll want to repeat a number of times during the cooking process.  

For your first read of the recipe, pay careful attention to the ingredients and equipment the recipe requires.  Make sure that the ingredients you don’t already have can be found where you live and that you can afford them.  (For example, I skip recipes that call for truffles… I can’t find them locally and, even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to afford them.)  Ask yourself which ingredients you already have and put the ones you don’t have on your grocery list.  

Do the same for the equipment the recipe calls for.  Does the recipe call for a food processor?  Do you have one?  Are you willing to buy one?  Can you substitute something else such as a blender or really amazing knife skills?  Again, make sure you have, or can acquire, the tools necessary to prepare the recipe.

If there is a technique with which you're unfamiliar, this would be a good time to research it.  Look it up on Google or search for a video of the technique on YouTube. 

2. Establish a timeline for preparing the recipe (Read the recipe again)
This is, without a doubt, the step where my cooking always runs into problems and makes me think, “Gwen, you know you need to read the recipe!!”  

Carefully read the instructions, this time paying close attention to the times stated in the recipe.  Look for steps that are stated in hours or days – those might hamper plans for a quick Monday night dinner.  If the recipe says “coat in salt and refrigerate overnight,” you want to know when you’re planning the meal that you should start a day in advance.  If the dish needs to slow cook for 2 hours in a low oven, that’s something to take note of so you don’t make the recipe on a day you’re pressed for time.  

Try to establish a timeline for the recipe, either on paper or in your head.  I tend to use paper since it appeals to my list-making nature.  Think about which steps of the recipe are unattended – the ones where you can just walk away and let some ingredients do their own thing for a while.  Think about which steps of the recipe will require constant attention.  You can probably watch a movie while letting dough rise, but don’t try to when you’re cooking a risotto.  

3. Gather equipment
I have a rather small kitchen, so most of my gadgets live in the utility room.  There are few things worse than having to stop in the middle of food prep to go grab some tool that I need in order to continue cooking.  It breaks my stride; it takes me out of The Zone!  

So I suggest that you gather all of the things you’ll need before you start cooking – especially if you need someone else to grab it from the top shelf.  

Note: This step might be modified by the findings in step 2.  If you need a bowl to mix dough in today, but won’t be cooking it until tomorrow, feel free to leave your bread pan where it lives until tomorrow.

4. Gather all of the ingredients
This step logically follows the previous one and exists for the same reason.  Gather your ingredients so they’re all close by.  This is also a good time, before you start doing any food prep or actual cooking, to ensure that you really do have all the ingredients you need.  

Not that I’ve ever started cooking to realize I’m missing some key important ingredient… oh no.  If you gather all of your ingredients in the beginning, you can afford having to run (or send someone else to run) to the store in the middle of cooking.  

Note: This step might also be modified by the findings in step 2.  If you need to marinate meat for a few hours, you can leave the ingredients for the sauce you’ll serve it with in the fridge for a few hours.

5. Prepare ingredients (Read the recipe again)
Chefs have this thing called “mise en place” that means “everything in place.”  The techniques that chefs use can benefit home cooks like me, and probably you too!  

Start by reading the recipe again.  If the recipe has a lot of ingredients, I might even make another list for the order in which I need to prepare things.  I try to cut the vegetables first and save the meats for last so I don’t need to worry about the meat contaminating things.  

If the recipe calls for ingredients to be added to the pot at the same time, put them in the same small bowl or plate after you’ve prepared them.  For example, many recipes call for garlic and ginger to be added at the same time so, when I’m prepping for those recipes I’ll place the garlic and ginger together in a small bowl.  This saves my dishwasher from washing 20 little bowls and makes it so he only needs to wash 3 or 4.  A happy dishwasher makes for a happy home.  

The important part of this step is that you prepare the ingredients.  Do all the chopping now.  Measure your spices now.  Have everything ready so that when you start cooking, you can cook and not have to stop, and risk overcooking something, because you didn’t prep in the beginning.  

I used to think that I could prepare ingredients as I went, but cooking has become so much more pleasant now that I take the time to prepare before I start cooking.  I do believe that every recipe really should have a first step of “prepare all ingredients.”  

Note: This step might also be modified by the findings in step 2.  Although I often do find it useful to prepare everything at once anyway, this assumes it will keep in its prepped state.  Use your best judgment.

6. Cook! (And read the recipe, yet again)
Now that you have all of your ingredients ready, and all of your tools close at hand, start cooking!

7.  Bon Appetit!

I am not quite ready to give up!  I feel like I’m so close to success and just need to make a few more tweaks to achieve it. 

Attempt #4 left me with the sad realization that my starter just doesn’t seem to be started well enough to generate the yeast that bread needs to rise.  I feel that it will get there with love, time, and care, but it’s not there yet.  This means that a major culprit of my non-rising dough is probably due to the lack of yeast.  To combat this, I opted to add yeast for attempt #5.  Sadly, I seem to have lost my notes for that attempt.  It didn’t rise as much as it should have because my dough was entirely too dry thanks to my earlier attempts that involved adding more flour. 

Attempt #6, however, was much more successful!  That attempt went something like this:

Morning Day #1
Proof Starter: Pour starter into large bowl, add 1 cup water and 1 cup flour, stir and set aside until evening.  (Here I opted to start feeding my starter with wheat flour instead of white flour, just to reduce the amount of refined flour in the bread.)

Evening Day #1
15 ounces all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon yeast
9 ounces sourdough starter
4 ounces water
3 ounces beer
1 tablespoon white vinegar

1. Whisk flour, salt and yeast in large bowl.  Add starter, water, beer and vinegar.  Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl.  Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature until morning. 

Morning Day #2
1. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside 10-inch skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment-lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until dough has doubled in size and does not readily spring back when poked with finger, about 2 hours.

2. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500*F. Carefully remove pot from oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot and place in oven. Reduce oven temperature to 425*F and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210*F, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.



Since I didn’t post pictures of the failed attempts 4 and 5, you can’t see how much better this loaf is than those loaves were!  This loaf has almost twice the height of loaves 4 and 5!  It did rise better than attempt #3 as well.  This loaf definitely felt like progress.  The wheat flour in the starter added a nice dimension to the flavor and the lack of refrigerator didn’t diminish the sourdough tang at all. 

I believe that my problem with this loaf was that I didn’t allow it to rise long enough on the morning of day 2.  It did readily spring back when I poked it, but I went with it anyway.  Very foolish.  For my next attempt I’ll be using a different vessel for the rising so that I can easily see when the dough is doubled. I think this will work better for me than the skillet where I have a hard time gauging things.  The house was pretty cold as well, so it might be that the temperature affected the rise. 

I think I’m close.