Independence Food Contest Victor!

It was PitchKnives’ 4th of July challenge, but that was nothing new to me.

Two summers ago, my wife and I threw a 4th of July party and asked everyone to bring some food to share. Most people brought the usual stuff — pasta salad, guacamole, beer — but one friend arrived with a loaf of homemade “Red, White, and Blue” bread, which looked as though it had just been lifted from the display window of a European bakery. It was delicious, filled with chopped sundried tomatoes and topped with slabs of Zingerman’s blue cheese.
I assumed she’d spent hours in her kitchen, kneading the thing herself, put she told me confidentially that she’d only put a half an hour of work into the process. The secret? Jim Lahey’s “My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method,” a cookbook that allows you to bypass the difficult parts of the bread-making process. All you need is time (for the bread to complete its slow rise) and a cast iron pot.
To be specific, you’ll also need the following:

3 cups unbleached bread flour

1 and 3/4th cup water
3/4th cup teaspoon active dry yeast (Fleischmann’s is a good brand)
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cup chopped sundried tomatoes (you can use olives, too, in which case you’ll probably want to omit the salt)

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