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Best Whole Wheat No Knead Loaf (yet)

Adapted from Chocolate & Zucchini's adaptation of Jim Lahey's recipe at The New York Times. Watch the video; it's worth it.

470g whole meal flour
13g salt
1/4 tsp yeast
350g water (plus a little more)
0ld dough [1]

Mix the flour, salt and yeast together in a stainless steel bowl. Add 350g of water and mix, adding more water a few drips at a time until the dough forms a moist, shaggy ball. How moist? The dough ball will slowly but visibly "settle" towards the bottom of the bowl.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for 24 hours.

After 24 hours, the dough should have risen significantly, filling the bowl like a luscious dough soup. If you tip the bowl a bit, the dough will ooze with gravity (the video has a good demo of this).

Give the counter top and your hands a generous sprinkle of flour. Turn the dough onto the counter. Pull the dough at either end to form a strip. Fold this strip into thirds (like a business letter). Give the dough a quarter turn and fold in thirds again.

We'll call these folds "seams". The dough is now sitting on the counter "seam side up".

Cover with plastic wrap and let stand for 15 minutes.

Generously coat the top and sides of the dough in corn meal, getting all the nooks and crannies.

Put a cotton towel in a bowl.

Pick up the dough and put it in the bowl seam side down.

Cover the top of the dough in corn meal. Rotate the bowl at a slight angle to make sure that the dough isn't sticking to the cotton. If it is, give the sticky bit some corn meal!

Cover the bowl with a cotton towel and wait impatiently for 2 hours.

At least 30 minutes before baking, turn on the oven to 230 C (450 F). Place a medium-sized pot with a lid in the oven [2].

When the 2 hours are up and the oven is preheated, remove the HOT pot from the oven, then remove its VERY HOT lid. Sprinkle corn meal at the bottom of the pot.

Remove the cotton blanket from the well-rested dough. Take the dough bowl, hanging on to the cotton towel the dough is sitting on, and swiftly turn the bowl upside down over the pot so that the dough falls into the pot seam side up. Don't be scared, just go for it! If the dough looks messy in the pot, give the HOT pot a little shake so the dough settles semi-uniformly. What the hell, sprinkle some more corn meal on the dough, and give the pot a little tilt to make sure the dough isn't sticking.

Put the pot into the oven. Bake for 40 minutes with the lid.

Remove the HOT lid and bake for another 5 minutes, but keep a close eye on the crust to make sure it doesn't burn. If it starts looking pretty dark, put the lid back on for the rest of the baking time.

Remove the pan from the oven. Turn the dough out on to a rack to cool for about 45 minutes before slicing.

[1] Furrow your brow as you may, but the use of "old dough" is a legitimate technique used by "real bakers"! The old dough is only a few days old, from a loaf I baked a few days prior. Here's the idea: reserve 1/4 cup of dough and put it in the fridge. The dough "develops" for a few days, kind of like a sourdough starter, and is then added to the next loaf of bread. I think it gave this latest loaf a nice flavor.

[2] Fancy bakers use cast-iron, but my stainless steel Ikea pot works just fine.