No-knead baguettes

Last weekend I when I blogged about baking a Dan Lepard bread recipe I mentioned that I had bought myself the Jim Lahey book called My Bread.  Today I tried out one of the recipes from the book – Italian baguettes called Stirato.  In the book the recipe makes 2 large Stirato but I decided to make 5 smaller ones so I could easily freeze them and use them for both my daily work sandwich and also Jonny’s school lunch box.

The dough is identical to the normal no-knead bread dough except I replaced the usual 1/4 tsp of yeast with a 1/4 cup of sourdough starter that I made for the Dan Lepard bread.  This dough was started yesterday afternoon and left to ferment overnight. 

This morning I separated the dough into 5 pieces and created 5 long sticks.  I proved them for 30 mins and then baked them in batches.  To bake them I placed the sticks on a baking tray pre-heated to 250 °C covered with an over-turned clay baking dish I had lurking unused at the bottom of a cupboard.  I had pre-heated the dish too.  Putting the dish on top of the baking tray enclosed the sticks in their own little steam oven so the finished Stirato were extremely crunchy on the outside.  I baked them for 16 mins enclosed at 250 °C and then 9 mins uncovered at 200 °C.  And this is how they turned out (with the clay baking dish in the background):

The Stirato  were perhaps a bit rustic looking but I think that adds to their charm

Here you can see what the Stirato looks like once sliced open – very airy with large aeration holes, a bit like Ciabatta:

And here is my lunch, a cheese and ham sandwich with added orange pepper so I could at least claim this was a healthy snack!