Record score of the Modernist Cuisine kitchens near Seattle is a catnip for food writers like me. They have not only all the toys, but also industrial versions of all the toys: rotovap machines, freezers, steam ovens, you name it. But the thing I remember most about my tour a few years back was a regular Samsung home oven in the middle. Modernist’s head chef, Francisco Migoya, opened her door and pointed to a cast iron pot in the middle of it that was so dark that it seemed to reflect no light.
Amidst this treasure chest of the nerd device, he said something like: That forty-dollar pot? This is the best tool you can buy to make bread at home.
Thanks to the pot and an almost perfect recipe, I now make fantastic breads several times a week. This is not a brag. The bread I make takes almost no skill on my part. I was just lucky with what was the pinnacle of what you can get by combining culinary laziness and the right tool for the job. While the internet is full of people who are obsessed with the sourdough breads they have enslaved (it is a whole process), you can make excellent bread with little time and almost no effort.
The Lodge 3.2-quarter cast-iron kitchen (also known as the “LCC3”) is where the magic happens. It’s a curious animal. Taken apart, the ‘lid’ is also a pan, and the bottom is a large saucepan. Put the former on top of the latter and you have a Dutch oven that with its two handles looks a bit like a child with a hood on its side. Turn it over so that the pan is at the bottom and you have an ideal bowl for baking bread. The breads I make have a lovely dark crust and a beautiful, feathery inside, known as the crumb. If I were to buy what I made at a fancy bakery, I would be 100 percent satisfied every time. The Combo Cooker costs $ 50 (only $ 40 on Amazon) and weighs £ 13, and is so cheap that I occasionally give it as a gift, as long as delivery is free.
A big part of why I like it so much is the recipe that makes it shine: Jim Lahey’s bread that has not been kneaded, something that has received a huge boost from some Mark Bittman stories in The New York Times, was then captured forever in his own book and Modernist bread. Instead of kneading or mixing a lot, the grunt works. Mix flour, yeast and salt, then add water and mix until it keeps itself in a ‘rough mass’. Then stick it on the counter overnight. Form it into a ball in the morning, let it rise again a bit, then put it in the preheated lodge and bake it. When I’m running, the work takes about 10 minutes. By waiting for it with the overnight rice, you let it strengthen the gluten in the dough and develop the flavors of the fermenting yeast, a technique known as autolysis and sleep.
There are still many magic tricks left when you switch to the pot. One of my favorites is how with dough in it it becomes a steam oven, a fetish item among bakers and chefs. With the relatively dense seal of the pot, the steam released from the dough is trapped inside. It is in fact a very stable oven in the larger one, and if you keep the steam inside, the surface of the bread can stretch while baking, so that the inside can rise while it is cooking.