Almost No-Knead Bread

This is a Cook's recipe with our modifications.

Perfect bread.

Ingredients

• 3c unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1/4tsp yeast
• 1.5tsp salt
• 3/4c + 2tbsp lukewarm water
• 1/4c + 2tbsp dogfishhead 90 minute IPA or similar?
• 1tbsp white vinegar

Whisk together the dry ingredients, then add the wet.  Stir together until you have a dough.  Then cover it and let it sit for 10 hours.  Turn it out onto a floured surface and knead 10-15 times.  It's a wet dough, so do the best you can.  Then form it into a ball by gathering all the corners together on one side to create a smooth surface on the other side of the dough ball.  Turn the dough onto the counter, pucker side down, to create a smooth dome on top, and move dough around in a circle to seal the corners together on the underside of the dough.  Now move the dough to a shallow skillet lined with parchment.  Let it sit another 2 hours.  After 1.5 hours, put the dutch oven (covered) in the oven and preheat to 500 degrees.  When the dough is done with the second rise, take the dutch oven out of the oven.  Slash the bread once across the top - about 1/2" to 3/4" deep.  Insert the bread and parchment into the dutch oven (using the parchment to transfer it to the dutch oven), cover, and return to the oven.  Set the dutch oven to 425.  After 30 minutes, remove the lid and cook for another 25 to 30 minutes, then remove from the oven and take the bread out of the dutch oven to cool.

Thoughts: This was a fantastic loaf of bread.  The crust was perfect, and the crumb was about perfect as well.  Really rich flavor. I might consider trying this with bread flour?  Or possibly make an herbed bread with rosemary?  It's a thought.  The oven spring wasn't as incredible as I had thought, though maybe if I let it sit 18 hours instead of 10 we'd have more to report from that.  Still.  One of our best loaves so far.  Side note: the crust texture suffered after a few days.  It went from super crispy and chewy to just kind of limply chewy.  Toasting it helped, but after about 2 days neither of us were sure we'd eat it untoasted.  Not that this was a big problem, but something to consider.

Disaster Index: 1/10