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Due to weather, Amy Bloom's reading tonight is cancelled.

Alvin and Larry Ubell, the Gurus of How-To, answer your questions about home repair. Call 212-433-9692 with your questions, or leave a comment below. The Ubells' Accurate Building Inspectors Website.

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Here’s my basic no-knead, long-fermented rustic bread, a round loaf, or boule. It’s an adaptation for the home kitchen of the much larger oval filone and the football-shaped pugliese sold at the Sullivan Street Bakery. I suggest you try this before any of the variations in Chapter Three, to get the hang of it. Even if you baked before, the process is probably nothing like what your experience would lead you to expect. For one thing, many people who bake this bread find the dough to be unusually wet. Remember that most of the water is meant to be released as steam in the covered pot, and you’ll be handling the dough very little anyway.

When my bakery was still on Sullivan Street, there was a fabulous Jamaican spot nearby where I liked to buy jerk beef patties for lunch. One day the baker brought out a coconut bread. “The best in the world, mon, try it,” he insisted. Soft, almost squishy, and sweet, it couldn’t have been more different from my rustic Italian breads, but it was undeniably delicious. To gild the lily, the guy made sandwiches with this bread and spicy beef patties, creating one of those amazing counterpoints that linger in your taste memory forever. Inspired by that bread, and by my childhood passion for the coconut-chocolate combo in Mounds bars, I created this coconut-chocolate combo in Mounds bars, I created this coconut-chocolate bread, using the basic technique.