This is basically an extended riff on the easy-peasy no-knead bread made
famous by Mark Bittman (and even famouser by Wonderwood). You start with
your basic bread dough -- 3 cups flour, 2 tsp salt, 1/4 tsp yeast, 1
1/2 cups of water, left to sit roughly 24 hrs -- which should
ultimately look kind of like this.
Take the dough out of it's bowl, and flatten it out on your floured surface as you normally would.
Now here's where we start to freestyle. Instead of folding the
pancake in onto itself to make a boule as you normally would, take a
butter knife and cut it up into six roughly equal pieces like so.
Now boule it up, making six mini-boules and leaving them to do their second rise, just as you would any full-size loaf.
At this point feel free to start heating the oven (with your
bread-baking pot inside, of course). And if that's enough excitement
for one day you can even stop here, throw these babies in when they're
through their second rise and the oven is hot, and you'll have some
kick-ass rolls on your hands. But if you're going to press on, now's
the time to start using your noodle to figure out exactly what you're
going to fill these miraculously self-contained little sammiches with.
What's worked best for me so far is garlicky spinach and cheddar cheese
(though I've no doubt you could throw nearly anything* in). So at this
point, I saute my spinach and devise some devious stratagem by which I
can convince my lady friend or whoever is around to grate some cheese
(cause damn, do I ever hate grating cheese). When you're done with your
prep and the mini-boules have had some time to do their thing, take one
and flatten it out again, stretch the corners out a bit so it looks
kind-of X shaped, and plop a good bit of your filling down into the
center.
Next grab one corner of your dough-X, stretch it out a bit, and fold it toward the center, tucking up the filling inside.
Then repeat the same thing with each corner, making sure both that
they overlap, and that there's no gaps for the filling to ooze out of
when it's baking.
Flip it over so the seams are down, repeat with each of your
mini-boules, and you're nearly ready to rock. The last (but crucial)
step involves cutting a little blow hole in the top of each boule,
since whatever you've put in there is bound to steam up a bit when you
throw it in the oven. Don't make that vent and you'll end up with a
sammich that's mostly air bubble. Mix up your patterns if you've got
more than one filling going and you don't want to end up playing
sammich roulette.
All that's left to do then is to finish up according to the
standard procedure. Arrange your boules triangle-like in each pot, bake
30 min covered, then 15 min uncovered and voila: a lunch with four
solid walls.
*Disclaimer: I say you can fill them with nearly anything because I've only ever had one combination go terribly wrong, which was spinach and portobello mushroom. My guess as to why is that once they hit the 425 oven, the mushrooms started sweating worse than Emeril Lagasse. The liquid all seeped out and then burnt, crusting something nasty underneath each boule and bonding it to the pot pretty solidly. My attempts to extricate them with grace failed pretty badly, and I ended up with a bready, fungusy mess. By contrast the cheese-and-spinach rolls (above, with the single hole) slid out pretty easily, and had those great molten-cheese-lava-flow marks to boot. Spinach and olives (triple hole) also worked great. The possibilities, though, are endless: pulled pork, anyone?
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