Scoring a tour of the Modernist Cuisine kitchens near Seattle, catnip is for food writers like me. Not only do they have all the toys, they also have industrial versions of all the toys: rotovap machines, blast freezers, steam ovens, you name it. But what I remember most from my tour a few years ago was a simple Jane Samsung home oven in the middle of it all. The modernist’s chef, Francisco Migoya, opened the door and pointed to a cast-iron pot in the center that was so dark that it didn’t seem to reflect any light.
In the midst of this nerd gadget’s treasure trove, he said something like: That forty dollar jar? That is the best tool you can buy for making good bread at home.
Thanks to that pot and a near-perfect recipe, I now make fantastic bread a few times a week. This is not boasting. The bread I make requires almost no skill on my part. I just got lucky in what turned out to be the top of what you can get by combining culinary laziness and the right tool for the job. While the internet is full of people obsessed with the sourdough breads they’ve worked on (it’s quite a process), with a little bit of time and almost no effort, you can make an excellent loaf of bread.
The Lodge 3.2-Quart Cast Iron Combo Cooker (aka “the LCC3”) is where the magic happens. It is a curious animal. Taken apart, the “lid” is also a frying pan and the bottom is a large saucepan. Place the former on top of the latter and you have a frying pan that with its two handles looks a bit like a child with a scoop on the side. Turn it over so that the frying pan is underneath and you have an ideal container for baking bread. The breads I make have a nice dark crust and a nice, springy interior, also called the crumb. If I bought what I made from a fancy bakery I would be 100 percent satisfied every time. At $ 50 (just $ 40 on Amazon) and weighing in at 13 pounds, the Combo Cooker is so cheap that I give it as a gift every once in a while, as long as the shipping is free.
A big part of why I love it so much is the recipe that makes it shine: Jim Lahey’s no-kneaded bread, something that got a huge boost from a few Mark Bittman stories in The New York Times, then was anchored in his own book and forever Modernist bread. Instead of kneading or mixing a lot, time does the grunt work. Combine flour, yeast and salt, then add water and mix until it holds together in what is known as a “rough mass”. Then stick it on the counter overnight. In the morning, shape it into a ball, let it rise slightly, then put it in the preheated Lodge and bake it. When I’m on the game, the manual work takes about 10 minutes. Waiting for that overnight rising allows you to amplify the gluten in the dough and develop the flavors of the fermenting yeast, a technique called both autolysis and sleep.
There are plenty of 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 cooks. With the relatively tight seal of the pot, the steam released from the dough is trapped inside, making the heat transfer to the dough particularly efficient. It’s basically a very stable little oven in your larger one, and keeping the steam inside allows the surface of the bread to stretch during baking so the interior can rise during cooking.