I am sure that you will get lots of responses to your post about No
Knead Bread.
White bread is flour, water, yeast and salt. I don't know where you
got the idea that there has to be sugar. There is plenty of food in
flour, that's why we eat it. Adding sugar to a baguette dough in
France would get you stood up in front of a firing squad.
The whole point of this bread is a slow rise with little
yeast. Rapid rise is for rapid rising. It was probably spent two
hours after you started. The slow rise probably goes through 3
lifetimes for the yeast.
The yeast you bake with are the grandchildren of the yeast you
started with. The are lots more grandchildren than there are grandparents.
The logistics of getting the dough into the hot pot was apparently
left for the students to figure out. I cut a piece of parchment
paper fit to the bottom of the pot, put some corn meal on a peel,
then the parchment paper on the peel and dumped the risen dough
upside down onto the parchment paper, then held the peel over the hot
pot and pulled back and prayed. It plopped right in. Plan B is to
put the parchment paper under the dough as it rises (line the bowl
with the paper), then put it right side up onto the peel. The
finished loaf would look prettier that way.
I suggest doing the recipe as written one time with the ingredients
listed, then try making changes.
Werner