Combine all ingredients except corn meal in a large bowl. Mix until they form a wet, shaggy, sticky dough.

Cover. Let sit at room temperature for 18 hours, or until bubbles form on the surface of the dough, and the dough clings to the side of the bowl in long glutinous tendrils.

Flour a working surface. Decant the dough onto the working surface. A good rubber or silicon spatula will help a lot here.

Using that helpful spatula or your hot sticky hands, fold dough over onto itself once or twice.

Cover lightly with plastic wrap. Let rest for 15 minutes.

Put a clean cotton towel on a decent-sized cutting board. Dust that clean cotton towel with corn meal. Working very quickly with well-floured hands, form the sticky, sticky dough into a ball. Place the dough ball on the towel, seam side down.

Dust the top of the dough ball with some more corn meal and cover with another clean cotton towel.

Leave it alone to rise for at least 2 more hours, preferably 3 or 4. The dough ball should double in size, and when you poke it should spring back very slowly if at all.

Get a big, heavy pot, like a dutch oven. Le Creuset dutch ovens work very well, but you have to remove the plastic handle from the lid. I filled the hole with some crumpled aluminum foil.

One half hour before the end of the 2nd rise, put your big, heavy pot, lid on, in the oven. Preheat to 450 degrees.

One half hour later, clean off the top of your stove.

Put the cutting board with the big dough blob resting between towels on one side. Take off the top towel. Take the hot HOT pot out of the oven. Remove the lid.

Have a metal spatula handy.

Slip one hand, preferable wearing some sort of heat-resistant glove, under the towel that holds the dough. Hold the HOT pot with your other hand, again, preferably wrapped in some sort of deep burn prevention device.

Flip the dough blob into the pot. If you miss really badly and it sticks to the side, scrape it down with the metal spatula. If you only miss a little, shake the pot a bit to even out the dough.

Put the lid on, put the pot in the oven, and set your timer for 30 minutes.

After it bings, take the top off. Set it again for 15, and after that check the bread frequently until the crust is the color that you like.

Take the pot out. Slip the edge of the metal spatula under the loaf so you can flip the end up and grab it with another clean kitchen towel.

Cool on a rack.

Unless you live in the vicinity of Zingerman's, or have generous friends who do and send you their bread in the mail, you are about to eat the best bread you've ever had. And you made it yourself. And it was silly easy.