No Knead Bread

"You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and the people ate outside at tables on the sidewalks so that you saw and smelled the food." - Hemingway

It sort of smells a little like Paris around here whenever we bake bread.


The blogs have been raving about "no knead bread" posted on the New York Times last year by Mark Bittman. It is originally from Jim Lahey, of Sullivan Street Bakery.

It really is an excellent way to make very good bread.

In a large glass or ceramic mixing bowl, combine:

3 cups all purpose flour or bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Mix well to combine dry ingredients

Add:

1 1/2 cups water

Mix together with a spoon and then cover and set aside until the next day.


The next day the dough will look something like this.








Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

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Bread

I decided to try making some bread this weekend. It turned out rather nice.

I started off making the sponge, which was one handful of flour, a packet of rapid rise dry yeast and about a teaspoon of sugar.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and add about a cup of hot tap water. The yeast packet says about one hundred and thirty degree water. I just let the water run until I was sure it wasn't getting any hotter and added that, probably about 120 degrees.


I let this sit for about fifteen minutes so that the yeast could be activated.

Next I started adding in flour one handful at a time. I ended up with about 7 handfuls of flour added before it was ready to be kneaded.

My handfuls must have been about 1/2 a cup.


Kneading the dough....









After the dough was kneaded for about 10 minutes, I put in an oiled bowl and covered it.







After about an hour the dough had doubled in size.

Then I kneaded the dough for about a minute more and cut it in half and formed two dough balls.





I shaped these two balls into loaves and cut some slits in the top.

I baked the two loaves on 350 for about 35 or 40 minutes, which yielded the two finished loaves in the top photo.

This bread turned out very delicious.