It’s taken me a long time, but I’ve finally perfected gumbo. I’ve gone through countless over-complicated recipes over the years and have systematically thrown out the steps and ingredients that were superfluous. This recipe is what remained. It’s the best gumbo I’ve ever had.

I usually do a shrimp and sausage gumbo, but you could add crab, fish, chicken thighs, smoked turkey, or anything else you like. But you have to use one pound of hot andouille sausage or it won’t come out the same. That’s where the spices come from in this version.

Here’s pretty much everything you need:

Chad Chandler’s Perfect Gumbo

• 1 lb jumbo shrimp, halved (shells reserved)
• 1 lb hot andouille sausage, sliced
• 1 lb smoked sausage, sliced
• 2 large (or 3 medium) onions, diced
• 4 large bell peppers, chopped
• 5 stalks celery, chopped
• 1 lb fresh okra, sliced, divided
• 8 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 14.5 oz cans stewed tomatoes, crushed
• 7 cups water
• 1 14.5 oz can chicken stock (1 3/4 cups)
• 14 tablespoons butter (just get two sticks), divided
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/3 cup worcestershire sauce
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
• 1/8 teaspoon dried thyme

It’s easy to looked at this lengthy ingredient list and get intimidated, but it’s not really as complicated as it seems. There’s a lot of chopping and stirring at first, but once the gumbo is on the stove, you can walk away. Plus, you end up with six quarts of gourmet food for around $25.

You’re going to need a dutch oven or a large pan for the roux, a large pan for the sausage, and a small pot for the shrimp stock. So make room on the stove. I usually pour everything into a stock pot after it’s all mixed together and clean the other pots and pans.

To begin, slice the andouille sausage into 1/4 inch rounds and cut the smoked sausage into 1/4 inch half-moons. I do that so the wife knows which sausage is spicy and which is not. I throw the sausage into a large pan over medium heat while I’m chopping all of the onions, peppers, celery (known as the Holy Trinity in Cajun cooking) and garlic. You want to render the fat and let it crisp around the edges.

Once the veggies are all chopped (but not the okra), I pour the water and the chicken stock into a small pot and put it on the back burner. I bring out the shrimp and leave them on the counter by the stove.

Next, it’s time to make the roux. A roux isn’t difficult, but it is labor-intensive. And since gumbo gets its taste, color and texture from the roux, you can’t cheat. You melt a stick and half (12 tablespoons) of butter over medium heat until it foams. Then you gradually mix in 3/4 cups of flour. This process takes about twenty minutes, so be prepared to whisk almost constantly the entire time.

If the roux burns, it’s ruined; you have to start all over. So stir it constantly until it darkens to the color of peanut butter. Then it should get a little more watery and you can go about 20 seconds between stirring sessions. This is when I take the opportunity to peel the shrimp. I peel one, toss the peel into the pot of water, put the shrimp in a bowl, and then whisk the roux. Then another shrimp in hand, peel into the water, shrimp into a bowl, and whisk the roux. Over and over again until they’re all peeled and the shrimp are back in the fridge.

It can be a little daunting managing all of these pans at the same time, but you’ll get the hang of it eventually. Or better yet, get a helper. The wife was busy making new pillows for our den furniture, so I was on my own as usual.

Turn the heat up to medium-high on the shrimp stock. You want it to simmer (so turn it to low once it’s boiling) until the roux is finished cooking. If it starts to foam on top, slide it off the heat and blow on it or it’ll spill over and your house will smell like burnt marine exoskeleton for a few days.

Meanwhile, you should still be stirring the roux and shaking the sausage pan to make sure it’s not burning. If the suasage does start to stick to the bottom, just pour a little water into the pan to deglaze it.

When the roux gets to be the color of a Hershey’s chocolate bar, you’re done.

Place a colander over your roux pot and slowly pour in the stock. Once it’s all incorporated, whisk vigorously to combine. This is the base of your gumbo. Most of the work is done.

Turn the heat to medium-low and turn your focus to the sausage. By now, the sausage should have rendered a lot of orange-colored fat. You want to remove the sausage with a slotted spoon and toss it into the gumbo pot. Pour out all of the fat except for about three tablespoons. Add a couple of tablespoons of butter and pour in as much of the Trinity as you can get into the pan. Sprinkle a big pinch of salt over the vegetables. This will purge the water into the pan. If you can’t fit all of the Trinity into the pan, then just toss the rest into the gumbo pot.

You’re really just using the Trinity to deglaze the sausage pan and absorb all of the sausage flavor. While the vegetables render and eventually cook off their water, open the cans of tomatoes. Shake out the excess liquid over the sink, but it’s not a big deal if some remains. Pour the stewed tomatoes into a bowl and squeeze the chunks through your fingers until it’s all crushed uniformly. Then pour it into the gumbo pot.

When the trinity is starting to sizzle and brown, toss in the minced garlic, stir well, and let it all cook for a few more minutes. Then toss it all into the gumbo pot. You might have to use a bigger pot, and you might not.

Cut half of the okra into 1/2 inch rounds and toss it into the gumbo pot with the worcestershire, thyme, salt, and pepper. You’ll add the rest later. Bring the gumbo to a boil and then reduce the heat to low. If you taste the gumbo now, it’ll seem watery and off-tasting because of the worcestershire. That’s normal. Just trust me. Don’t add any more seasonings. Cover and simmer for at least four hours and up to six and it’ll turn out great.

After a few hours, slice and add the remaining okra. When there’s an hour left until you’re planning to serve the gumbo, take the lid off the pot and turn up the heat a little. You want to evaporate about a half-inch of the liquid. Just stir it occasionally so it doesn’t stick to the bottom and look at the waterline in the pot. When you’re fifteen minutes away from serving, cut the shrimp in half with some kitchen shears and add them to the gumbo. They’ll cook almost instantly.

Season to taste with a little salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Serve with white rice, hot sauce, and filé powder if you like it. I love filé in dark stews. It’s just dried and pounded sassafras leaves. But you should know that it gets gummy if it boils, so you never add it to the pot. Just sprinkle 1/4 teaspoon over your bowl.

This gumbo demands a good amount of prep work, but the payout is huge. The taste should be amazing, the texture should be thick and smooth, and you should have meat in every bite.

I’ve been going through my freezer and trying to use anything that’s getting old. I don’t have a lot of rules when it comes to cooking, but one of them is throw out anything that might be older than the cats. I remember during my freshman year of college, I pulled a jar of mayonnaise out of the fridge and it had completely separated back into egg and oil. Since then, I’ve never let anything lurk in the fridge for too long.

I made lasagna a couple of weeks ago. As usual, I had extra ground beef, ricotta, mozzarella, and sauce left over. I always mix it together and freeze the medley in a ziplock bag. That way, when I don’t really feel like cooking, I can just toss it with some ziti, add some jarred sauce, and I have an instant baked pasta. This time, I decided to use the mixture as filling for my ravioli.

The filling mixture can probably be replicated with one small container of ricotta cheese, a half cup of grated parmesan, a heaping tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley, a cup of shredded mozzarella, a cup of ground beef, a half cup of red sauce, and one egg yolk. As always, season to taste with salt and pepper.

The pasta dough is made with three eggs and between 2-2½ cups flour (instructions here). I rolled it very thin so that the dough wouldn’t be chewy. Next, I snipped off a corner of the ziplock so I could extrude the stuffing like frosting out of a pastry bag.

If I wanted to make large ravioli, I would have rolled out two sheets of dough and placed one on top of the other. But I like small ravioli, so I just folded the dough over like and long empanada and pressed out the air between the stuffing with my fingers. Next, I cut the dough into individual ravioli and sealed the edges with the back of a fork.

The stuffing looks small, but it spreads out inside the cavity during the cooking process. I let them dry on a well-floured baking sheet for a few hours and then boiled them in a large pot of salted water. I layered them in a pan with leftover sauce so they wouldn’t stick together.

These came out good. Next time, I’ll make this with another person. It would go a lot faster with one person rolling dough and the other person stuffing and cutting the ravioli. There are so many stuffing and sauce combinations. I can’t decide what to try next.

I’m only blogging it because the recipe is so good and so simple. I don’t want to forget it. I got it from About.com. The dough takes about two hours to rise and about forty-five minutes to cook. You need to let it cool for at least fifteen minutes, so this is a three hour recipe.

Ingredients
1 cup milk
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup warm water
2 packages active dry yeast
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp salt
1 cup of warm water
6-7 cups of unbleached bread flour

Preparation

Heat 1 cup of milk and 2 tbsp butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Remove from heat when the butter is melted. Set aside to cool.

Pour 1/2 cup of warm water into a small bowl. Slowly pour yeast into bowl while stirring. The constant stirring while adding the yeast will prevent the dry yeast from clumping. Set the bowl of yeast water aside for about 5 minutes while you work on the next 2 steps.

In a large bowl, add sugar, salt, and 1 cup of warm water. Mix.

Check the small saucepan of milk and butter. If the contents are warm to the touch, pour the liquid into the large bowl and mix.

Pour the yeast water into the large bowl. It is important that the batter is warm, not boiling hot. Hot liquid, such as the milk you heated up, will kill the dry yeast and prevent the bread from rising.

Begin mixing in the unbleached bread flour, one cup at a time. By the fifth cup of flour, the dough will begin to get stiff and it will be difficult to mix it with the wooden spoon. Turn dough out onto a floured board and begin to knead the dough. Continue adding more flour and kneading the flour into the dough until the dough is smooth, not sticky.

Next, grease a large bowl with butter. Put the bread dough into the bowl and then turn the dough over so that the top of the dough is now buttered. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and let the dough rise at room temperature until double in size or about 1 hour.

Punch down dough. Turn it out onto a floured board and knead out all the bubbles for about 5 minutes. Divide the dough in half and form each half into a loaf by rolling the dough into a rectangle. Roll the dough up like a jellyroll. Pinch seam closed. Pinch and tuck edges under the loaf.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Butter two loaf pans. Spread a light layer of yellow cornmeal on the loaf pans, if desired. Set loaves in pans, cover with kitchen towel, and allow to rise until double in size or for about a half hour.

Bake bread for about 45 minutes or until golden brown. Remove bread from oven and turn out loaves onto a rack or a clean kitchen towel. Allow to cool before cutting.

I mixed everything in the stand mixer and kneaded it with the dough hook on the second setting for a few minutes. It’s taken me years to learn what dough looks like when it’s wet, dry, smooth, etc. This dough gets worked until it’s smooth. Then I transferred it to a buttered bowl to rise. I like the crust you get on French bread better than standard white bread, so I brushed an egg white over the dough just before baking. I also like the crunch from corn meal on the underside of bread (and pizza crust), so I sprinkled some inside the bread pans. This is what the inside should look like when it’s done right.

Judging by the ubiquity of ebelskiver pans these days, a lot of people seem to jumping on the bandwagon. The wife has an well-sesoned cast iron pan that her mother handed down. The recipe she uses is pretty simple. If you want more recipes, check out this cookbook.

Ebelskivers

• 3 eggs
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 cups buttermilk

Ebelskivers are basically little oblong pancakes. They can be stuffed with anything, usually jellies, but I like them plain. The trick to making them right is setting the heat to medium-low and giving the pan ample time to heat up.

Separate the eggs, placing the whites in a small bowl and yolks in a medium bowl. With an electric mixer at high speed, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and set aside. Then with the electric mixer at medium speed, beat the egg yolks until slightly thickened. Gradually add the sugar and salt, beating until it’s all light and fluffy. Sift together the remaining dry ingredients. At medium speed, beat them into the egg yolk mixture, alternating with buttermilk until thoroughly mixed. With a rubber spatula, gently fold the egg whites into the ebelskiver batter until it’s well combined. Then you spray the pan with PAM and fill the impressions up 2/3 of the way with batter.

After two or three minutes, you should be able to rock the batter back and forth with a chopstick. That’s when you know it’s time to flip them. If you’re filling them with preservatives, herbs, cheese, etc, this is when you do it. Then you just top it with a little more batter. If you’re leaving them plain, just flip them over. The wife has spent years perfecting her flipping motion with chopsticks, and she’s gotten really good at it.

Then you let it cook for a few more minutes and pop the finished ebelskivers onto a pan. Keep them in a warm oven until the entire batch of batter is cooked. Most people eat them with powdered sugar on top. The wife got the interiors of these ebelskivers light and fluffy.

If you do it right, the filling will remain in the middle and not bubble out.

This recipe will make about 28. These were the best she’s ever made. None of them burned at all. Sadly, I prefer the burnt ones. Without butter or sugar. I guess I have pretty bland taste.

Here’s everything you need:

Roasted Garlic Spaghetti

• 2½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 head garlic, roasted and mashed
• 2 eggs
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• water, as needed

We roast a lot of garlic in my house. Whether its for hummus or garlic butter, it’s an easy and healthy way to add a smoky taste to a dish. All you have to do is scalp the head to expose the cloves, drizzle it with a little salt and olive oil, and roast it in a foil pouch at 400° for about 30 minutes. It’s done when the cloves are soft and golden brown.

When it’s cool, you squeeze the cloves out of the bulb.

Next, use the side of your knife to mash the garlic into a paste.

Just like last time, you make a well in the dry ingredients and add the wet ingredients.

Mix it all until it holds together (it may need more water or flour), knead it a couple dozen times, and let it rest under a wet rag for about fifteen minutes.

Press it until it’s the desired thickness. On my machine, I dial it down to the third setting.

Finally, you pass it through the cutter. My pasta press makes angel hair pasta.

Toss the spaghetti with flour so it doesn’t stick together. Let it cool in the fridge until the salted water is boiling rapidly. Cook the noodles for a few moinutes until they’re al dente and toss them with a sauce. I just quickly roasted some shallots, garlic and cherry tomatoes in a sherry reduction and tossed it with some fresh herbs from the garden, some finely grated parmesan cheese, and my homemade spaghetti.

It came out pretty good, but the wife and I agreed that we couldn’t really taste the roasted garlic in the noodles. Sometimes we thought we did, but we weren’t sure if we were just imagining it. Next time I’ll double the amount of garlic. If I still can’t taste it, I’ll just stick with the basic egg noodle recipe.

We froze about a third of the dough. I think we’ll play around with some free-form pastas next.

After my long and frustrating experiment in homemade bread making, I was leery of starting a new hobby that involved flour. Had I known that making pasta from scratch was so easy, I would have started years ago. To make basic egg noodles, here’s everything you need:

Homemade Linguine Noodles

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 eggs
• water, if needed

I could have used the stand mixer to knead the dough, but I always think it’s worth doing things the hard way at least once to know what ‘too wet’ and ‘too dry’ looks and feels like.

Pour the flour on a clean working surface. Run your fingers through it to break up any lumps. Make a well in the middle and add the wet ingredients.

Fold everything onto itself until the mixture starts to bind. Sometimes I have to add a couple of handfuls of water to get the dough to bind so I can knead it properly. Other times, I have to add more flour to stiffen it up a bit. Once the dough ball is formed, cover it with a damp towel for about 15 minutes to let the flavors meld.

Next, use a dough cutter to break off 1/4 inch pieces, one at a time. Using the press, you run the dough through on the widest setting. You keep adding flour and folding it over onto itself until it takes on a reliable shape (meaning there aren’t any bits hanging off the edges anymore).

Then you run it through the press, narrowing the width with each pass until it reaches the desired thickness. It can get pretty long. This is one of those times where having a kitchen island on wheels comes in really handy.

Finally, you pass the dough through the cutter. My machine cuts linguine/fettuccine and spaghetti noodles.

You shake the fresh pasta strands with a little flour so the noodles don’t stick together and repeat the process until there’s no more dough. That’s pretty much it. My dough ball made enough pasta to fill a 9 x 9 inch casserole dish, or enough to feed four people comfortably. I left the noodles in the fridge for about 6 hours until dinner.

Fresh pasta cooks really fast. You just bring a pot of heavily salted water to a rolling boil and add the noodles. Stir occasionally to keep the pasta from sticking.

After a few minutes, they’re done cooking. I figured, what better way could there be to eat fresh, homemade pasta than in a carbonara?

This was the best pasta alla carbonara I’ve ever made, even though –gasp!– I used bacon instead of guanciale or pancetta. The wife was very pleased with the texture and taste of the noodles, which is a big deal because she seems to have texture issues with everything that I like these days.

Next time I’m going to experiment with some eggless noodles and flavored pastas.

Here’s everything you need to make the Cajun Rémoulade. It’s really a knock-off rémoulade recipe made with mayonnaise instead of oil and eggs, but it was pretty good with the tomatoes.

Fried Green Tomatoes With Cajun Rémoulade

• 1 cup mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons sour cream
• 1 tablespoons catsup
• 1 tablespoon creole mustard or cajun mustard or deli style mustard
• 1½ teaspoons fresh parsley (chopped )
• 1½ teaspoons cayenne pepper (1 tsp for mild)
• 1½ teaspoons lemon juice (freshly squeezed)
• 1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
• 1 garlic clove
• ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
• ½ teaspoon celery salt
• ½ teaspoon paprika

I basically halved this recipe and added a little sour cream. Just mix everything together in a bowl:

When I fry my tomatoes, I usually make the crust out of equal parts corn meal and bread crumbs with a little salt and spices mixed in. My wife recently read somewhere that you can use instant mashed potato powder as a dredge ingredient to add texture and flavor to the crust. I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s everything you need to coat the green tomatoes:

From left to right, we have flour to coat the tomato slices, eggs, cream and a little Dijon mustard to make the egg wash, and the cornmeal, potato and spice mixture for the crust. Most people add their spices to the flour, but I like to add it to my crust mixture. That’s what your tongue touches when you eat it. I usually sprinkle in some salt, cayenne and paprika.

Slice the tomatoes at least 1/3 inch thick, if not larger. Discard the top and bottom slices; they won’t hold any crust. Just put them in a plastic bag and keep them for a later recipe.

Heat some canola oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. While the oil is warming, start making your tomatoes. Coat both sides with flour and shake off the excess. Next, dip both sides of the tomato slice in the egg wash and shake off the excess. Finally, coat both sides in the crust mixture and place them in a tray next to the saucepan. This can be a little messy, so you want to set up an assembly line. It’s times like this when my movable island comes in really handy.

To see if the oil is hot enough, stand the wooden spoon handle upright in the pan. If the oil bubbles like crazy around it, it’s good to go. Carefully slide the tomatoes down the side of the pan and into the oil. Don’t overcrowd the pan or the temperature of the oil will drop too much and the tomatoes will come out soggy.

They cook quickly, so don’t walk away. Use two wooden spoons to flip them. You’ll get the timing right after a batch or two. Place them on some paper towels to cool. Remember, people will only see the tops of the tomatoes, so only one side needs to be really pretty.

These came out pretty good overall, but the crust was a little thin for my taste. The instant mashed potato mixture was a nice touch. Next time I’ll add it to the flour mixture for flavor and go back to my breadcrumb and cornmeal crust for added crunch. The cajun rémoulade was okay. It tasted good with the tomatoes, but I think I’m always expecting remoulades to taste like the soul-changing version they make at the Arizona Biltmore. This one was grainy and mayonaisey by comparison. I want a smoother, more peppery flavor and a reddish-orange color. Next time I’m going to make an aioli with roasted garlic and pureed peppadews. I think that’ll add the smoky, spicy kick I’m looking for.

The second loaf was a garlic and herb bread. I used my basic recipe and added about three tablespoons of minced garlic, 1/3 cup chopped oregano and sage, and a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. I added all the extra ingredients just before the second rise, a couple of hours before baking. The herbs stayed moist and the garlic roasted, so the flavor was smoky and sweet. If I’d had some parmesan cheese on hand, I would have added some of that too.

We made some more pimento cheese and have been using this bread to make the sandwiches. It toasts really well and gooey bits of cheese ooze through the holes in the bread when you bite down. My inner child really enjoys this.

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.