I strayed from the original recipe a little. Here’s everything you need:

Parchment Baked Grouper

• 1 pound grouper
• 1 zucchini, sliced
• 2 roma tomatoes, sliced
• 1 can quartered artichoke hearts, rinsed
• 2 tablespoons butter, divided
• 4 tablespoons white wine, divided
• 2-4 sprigs fresh rosemary
• juice from 1 lemon
• salt, pepper and cajun spices to taste

There’s not much to this recipe. Preheat the oven to 450°. Rinse the artichoke hearts and slice the zucchini and tomatoes.

Tear two pieces of parchment paper into 18 inch squares. If you don’t have any parchment paper, just use foil instead. Lay two sprigs of rosemary in the center of the paper. Season the fish with salt, pepper, and some Tony Chachere’s and place it atop the rosemary. Chachere’s is to the deep south what Old Bay is to the mid-atlantic. You can get run out of town for cooking seafood without it.

Place the vegetables on top of the fish and season with a little more salt and pepper. Finally, place a tablespoon of butter atop each stack of vegetables. Fold the parchment paper, making sure to overlap the seams and end pieces so no liquid will leak out. I drafted the wife for this maneuver. She pretty much made the whole meal.

Once the parchment paper has creased, gently unwrap it and divide the lemon juice and white wine between the two packets. Fold the paper again to seal in the liquid. It might seem like the edges will unwrap during the cooking process, but they won’t. Bake for about 20 minutes. Let the packets cool for a couple of minutes and then gently unfold the paper to release the steam.

This meal exceeded my expectations. I usually think of steamed foods as being bland and mushy. This dish made me rethink that stereotype. We’ll make this again, and soon.

Here’s my basic recipe: Chad Chandler’s (Almost) No-Knead Bread Recipe It looks complicated, but it’s really not. Once you bake a loaf of bread, you’ve essentially mastered and memorized the cooking process.

I’ve tried all kinds of techniques to infuse flavorful ingredients throughout the bread. I’m sure there are other (probably better) methods, but here are my personal tips and techniques I’ve picked up along the way:

• Don’t be a tight-ass and substitute another brand of flour. Buy the blue and white bag of King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour. It only costs a dollar more. You can use all-purpose flour when you do the kneading, but that’s the only time. The King Arthur brand is high-protein, so it absorbs more liquid. That means you can incorporate more flavor into your bread without gumming it up (by gummy, I mean moist and dense and doughy).
• It’s okay to use water to make the dough, but beer has more flavor. Start with a 50/50 ratio of beer and water. Once you’re making good bread, feel free to start experimenting with different flavored beers and the beer/water ratio.
• Beer doesn’t drastically alter the taste of the bread. It’s more like a subtle under-taste, if that makes any sense. I like to use Michelob Amberbock, Dundee’s Honey Brown, Budweiser and Bud Light’s new Golden Wheat. Really, it’s just an excuse for me to buy a six-pack of something different.
• I like wheat bread, but I never use more than ¾ cup of wheat flour in my recipes. I don’t know the science at work here, but it seems like more wheat = gummier bread.
• If I’m adding wet ingredients like honey, olive oil, vinegar, tahini, roasted garlic, etc… I add them when I mix the dough.
• If I’m adding solid ingredients like grated asiago cheese, fresh herbs, chopped olives, roasted sunflower seeds, etc… I add them when I knead the dough, just prior to its second rise.
• You have to add at least 4 big squeezes (4 tbsp?) of honey to the dough to be able to taste it, and even then it’s just a mild flavor.
• Dried herbs add little to no flavor to the bread. It just makes it look moldy.
• You can add 2 teaspoons of almost any wet ingredient (like apple cider vinegar or sherry) to the dough and barely taste it (if at all). So when you’re experimenting with new ingredients, start small. That way, if it doesn’t taste great, you don’t really ruin the loaf.
• There’s no reason to be afraid of kneading; you’re just stretching the bread dough. Fold the dough over and onto itself, flatten it, turn it a little, and repeat the process about 20 times. It’s more important to be consistent in the way you knead than to have the perfect form. Being consistent means you stretch all the dough evenly.
• I don’t put a lot of oil in the pot that I cook the bread in. I usually just drizzle in a little sunflower oil and rub it all over with a paper towel. From my experience, too much oil makes the bottom crust too hard.
• You MUST let the bread cool for at least an hour.
• You can control how hard the crust is by using foil when the bread cools. If you like really crispy crust, then let the bread cool alone on a rack. If you like your crust soft, let it cool wrapped in foil. I wrap mine in foil for 30 minutes and the open the foil for the last half hour.

My favorite bread is asiago cheese bread. To make it, you follow my basic dough recipe until the kneading step. To add flavor, you finely grate about 5 ounces of fresh asiago cheese. Next, lightly flour your working surface. Plop the dough onto the working surface and flatten it out into a large rectangle. Sprinkle about half of the cheese onto the dough:

Roll it up and repeat. Start folding the dough back onto itself. Each time you fold it, sprinkle in a little cheese on the dough. Also, as you add more flour to the working surface to keep the dough from sticking, add some cheese as well. That way you’re incorporating the cheese from two sides as you knead:

After a while, you shouldn’t be able to fold the dough anymore without seeing some cheese inside the dough (it should get very difficult to fold the dough anymore anyway):

Let the dough rise for a couple of hours in a well-oiled bowl:

When you drop the dough ball into the oven-warmed pot, sprinkle a tiny bit of cheese on the top. Finally, cook the bread like my recipe instructs. The same goes for any bread that has solid ingredients in the center.

Look at the crust on this asiago cheese bread:

And check out this honey-rosemary bread. To make it, I omitted the cider vinegar and garlic powder in the basic recipe and replaced them with 5 big squeezes of honey. Then I incorporated a little white sugar and some chopped, fresh rosemary during the kneading process. It came out great:

This is some garlic and herb bread:

I used about a quarter cup of chopped garlic. It roasts inside the bread, so the flavor is pretty mild. I also added a handful of chopped oregano, sage and parsley.

I store my bread in a large ziplock bag. When there are leftovers, I peel the crust off and cut the bread into cubes. Then I leave them on the counter overnight and in the morning I have flavorful croutons. I usually freeze them until I’m ready to make breadcrumbs.

I recently tossed them in the food processor to make breadcrumbs for some meatballs. They came out light and plump like panko, but with the infused flavors of garlic, cheese and herbs:

I soaked them in some buttermilk we had left over from my wife’s fresh batch of homemade butter and the meatballs came out tender and flavorful. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to the bland, grainy breadcrumbs that come in the round box.

UPDATE: Here’s another tip I should have mentioned.

Chad Chandler’s (Almost) No-Knead Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

• 3 Cups *King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour
• 2 Teaspoons Table Salt
• 1 Tablespoon Garlic Powder
• ¼ Teaspoon Instant Yeast
• ¾ Cup Warm Water
• ¾ Cup Beer (plus extra if needed)
• 2 Tablespoons Cider Vinegar
• All Purpose Flour (as needed for dusting work surface and kneading)
• 1 Tablespoon Olive Oil (or an oil with a higher smoke point)

Instructions:

1. Pour dry ingredients (flour, yeast, salt and garlic powder) into a large bowl and mix with a rubber spatula.
   
   
2. Add all wet ingredients (water, beer and vinegar) to the dry mixture. Using spatula, fold dough lumps over and over, scraping up dry flour from the bottom of the bowl until it starts coming together. After a while, you should have a big, sticky mass. When done right, you’ll have to scrape the dough off the spatula. If all the flour hasn’t come together after a minute, add a little more beer a splash ata time until it does. It’ll seem to magically go directly from too dry to too wet. That’s normal.
   
   
3. Cover the bowl with a non-terry cloth towel and let it sit at room temperature for about 16 hours. There’s not much difference between dough that rests for 12-20 hours, but 16 is my arbitrary default.
   
   
4. I know it says “no-knead” in the title, but you need to work the dough a little. If the yeast has done its job over the past 16 hours, the dough ball flattened out and bubbled like this: (the wetter the dough, the larger the mass)
   
   
   
   You just need to re-shape it into a ball. Plus, the light kneading process will make it rise more. Lightly flour a work surface and rub some on your hands. Slowly scrape the dough out of the bowl with your finger tips, like this:
   
   
   
   Knead the dough just enough times to make it less sticky and form a ball (maybe 15-20 times), adding more flour whenever it starts to stick to the working surface.
   
   
5. Clean the dough bowl and spray the bottom with non-stick spray (or rub some olive oil around with a paper towel). Drop the kneaded dough ball back into the bowl and let it rise again for 2 hours.
   
   
6. At about the 1½ hour mark, put a lightly-oiled dutch oven in the middle of the stove and preheat it to 425°. Most recipes call for a 6 quart pot, but my 4 quart Chantal dutch oven (fake Le Creuset from TJ Maxx) works fine. You want to get it really hot before you put the bread in it. That way the bread is baking (and steaming) in an oven inside of an oven.
   
   
7. At the two-hour mark, carefully take the pot out of the oven and remove the lid. A little smoke should escape. Without distorting the dough ball too much, pick it up and plop it into the center of the heated pot. Using kitchen shears, cut a small, shallow slit in the top of the dough ball to let some steam escape. Cover with the hot lid and put the pot back in the oven.
   
   
8. After 30 minutes, take the lid off the pot. That’s the only time you should open the oven door. The bread should have risen, but it won’t have much of a crust on it yet.
   
   
9. After another 25-30 minutes, take the pot out of the oven. Use a towel to lift the bread out of the pot (or flip it upside-down and shake the bread loose) and let it cool on a raised rack for at least an hour.
   
   

This recipe might look complicated, but it’s really not. With minimal skill and effort, you end up with this:

The only drawback to my recipe is the time involved. Needless to say, this isn’t an impulse recipe. I usually mix my dough on Friday when I get home from work. It gives me a good excuse to pick up some beer on my way home. Whenever I wake up the next morning, I knead the dough and then run to the farmers’ market to do my weekly grocery shopping. When I get back, I preheat the pot in the oven and cook the bread. As long as the wife doesn’t eat too much over the weekend, it’ll last us the whole week. Whatever is left over goes into the freezer until I need to make bread crumbs.

Once you’ve mastered my basic recipe, learn how to add flavors to your no-knead bread.

*If you’re going to follow this recipe, you must use King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour (the blue and white bag). King Arthur is high-protein flour, which means it absorbs more liquid than generic, all-purpose flour. If you want to use another brand, you’ll have to cut down on the liquid.

Thanks to my new TV and my island on wheels, I can watch football and cook at the same time.

I experimented with this batch of dough a little bit. In order to speed up the cooking time, I cut the dough in half. With one half, I made a ciabatta loaf. With the other half, I divided the dough again and made two small Italian bread loaves. I baked the Italian loaves at 425° for about 25 minutes. Here’s how they turned out:

The flavor was good, but the loaves were still too moist and dense on the inside:

We ate half of one loaf, but the only really good part of them was the bottom crust. I cooked the ciabatta loaf for about 40 minutes. The crust came out much better this time around:

But just like last time, the inside was more dense and chewy than I like. It went straight from the oven to the trash. I probably should have saved it to make breadcrumbs, but throwing it away felt pretty empowering at the time. I’m going to try the no-knead recipe one more time before I give up, but I’m going to bake it in a cast iron dutch oven like this recipe suggests (more on that method here).

I was determined to have some bread in the house, so I found this video recipe for easy French Bread. Here are the ingredients:

1/4 cup warm water
1 cup tepid water
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 package yeast
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
tablespoon cornmeal
1 beaten egg white

Click here to get the detailed instructions. If you look at the picture of the kitchen above, you can see that I had this video up on my laptop.

The recipe is pretty straight forward and the stand mixer does all the messy work. Here’s some advice: this is a pretty dry dough, so it won’t ball up very fast and gather on the dough hook like some of the stickier doughs. It’s easy to over work it, so turn off the mixer when most of the dough forms a ball. I covered the dough ball with a towel and set it outside in the sun on the front porch. The cats were very confused. After an hour, I flatted the dough and rolled it into a loaf. After about another hour, I painted it with an egg white and cut some slits in the top:

In the video, the instructor says you’ll know when to take the bread out when it sounds hollow when thumped. Mine never sounded hollow. I took it out when the crust became brown and very rigid. Here’s the finished product:

The crust tasted great and the inside wasn’t bad either:

I think I overworked the dough a bit. I’m just starting to get a feel for making dough. I’ve also switched to *King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour, and that’s made a difference. If I can just perfect this one recipe, then I can start adding herbs, cheeses and various toppings. After that, I think baking will become more fun. And it is now, I feel a little foolish spending hours making a so-so loaf of bread when I can buy a perfectly cooked baguette at Publix for $2.99. And the upside of baking ends with artisan bread since, tragically, I was born without a fully-developed sweet tooth. So don’t expect too many dessert recipes on this site, unless of course I’m cooking something for the wife.

*Remember: if you’re going to cook with high-protein flour, you have to add a little extra water. King Arthur’s website says you should add about 2 teaspoons extra liquid for each cup of flour.

It seemed simple enough, so I gave it a try.

I followed the recipe exactly. The batter came together just like he said in the video, and I let the dough rise for about 19 hours. Here’s what my loaf looked like before cooking:

I let it bake for about 35 minutes. I really don’t have any experience with baking bread, so I didn’t know how to tell when it was done. I thumped the crust and it *felt done, so I took it out and let it cool.

When I sliced a few pieces, it was apparent I took it out a little too early:

The bread tasted good, but it was still a little doughy in the center. I put it back in the oven for about 8 minutes to let the interior finish cooking. After that, the bottom crust became as hard as a rock. So for anyone attempting this recipe, I would suggest baking the bread for about 42 minutes and throwing a half cup of water onto the oven floor just before closing the door. That way it will steam enough to keep the crust from getting too hard.

*Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to “know” when the bread is done, and how to keep the bottom crust from getting rock hard?

We made a chili-crusted pork tenderloin with roasted tomatillo salsa, a side dish of bulgur with herbs, and some provolone popovers.

I don’t really have a recipe for the pork. In a small bowl, I mix a couple of tablespoons of ancho chili powder with a little Old Bay, garlic powder, seasoned salt and coarsely ground black pepper. Just mix it to your liking. Next, add a couple of tablespoons of sunflower oil (or olive oil). I pour about 2/3 of the spice mixture over the pork and rub it in. I let the pork and the remaining spice mixture set in the refrigerator overnight. About a half hour before cooking, I take the pork out of the fridge. I mix the juice of half a lime (and maybe some zest) with the leftover spice mixture and rub it all over the pork tenderloins. Finally, I grill them until the internal temperature reaches about 145°. I take it off the grill and let it rest on a foil-covered plate for about ten minutes before slicing.

I dress the sliced pork with some Roasted Tomatillo Salsa (which I made earlier based on this recipe). The sweet taste of the salsa verde cancels out the heat from the chili powder, and you’re left with an earthy, smoky flavor combination that tastes great.

I’m a nut for grains like cous cous and bulgur, so my wife made some Bulgur with Herbs. It turned out pretty good, but the lack of fat was noticeable and it made the dish taste a little bland. Next time, we’ll start the recipe by chopping and frying a couple of pieces of bacon, and use the rendered fat to brown the almonds. We should have done it this time, since Saturday was International Bacon Day. Another way to add taste would be to use chicken stock instead of water to cook the bulgur.

My wife also made some Mini Provolone Popovers. They’re light and airy and taste like a cross between asiago cheese bagels and buttery pancakes. These were probably the star of the show. I would go so far as to say these mini provolone popovers would be a perfect substitute for quiche when you have family or friends over for brunch. I ate two of them for breakfast this morning.