No-Knead Bread


NYTimes: Here is one of the most popular recipes The Times has ever published, courtesy of Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery. It requires no kneading. It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. And it takes very little effort — only time. You will need 24 hours to create the bread, but much of this is unattended waiting, a slow fermentation of the dough that results in a perfect loaf.

NYTimes No-Knead Bread

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Stree Bakery

{(rater>id=100|name=No-knead Bread|type=rate|headline=off)}

Preheat: 450°Yield: 1 1-1/2 lb load
Prep: 0:10Wait: 0:24Cook: 0:45

Ingredients

  • 3 (430 gms) cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
  • ¼ (1 gm) teaspoon instant yeast
  • 1-¼ (8 gms) teaspoons salt
  • 1-5/8 (345 gms) cups water (Try closer to 1-1/2 cups, so the dough isn't quite so shaggy)
  • Flour, cornmeal or wheat bran as needed

Directions

  1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
  2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Notes

  1. Some versions of the recipe use 1-1/2 cups of water, some use 1-5/8. The first time I made it, it was an incredible mess. The next times, I used closer to 1-1/2 cups and the dough was much more manageable.
  2. I use a 6-8“ wide strip of parchment paper on the bottom instead of a floured cloth. The paper can be used as handles to put the bread in the pot and remove it. Since the dough isn't flipped into the pot, I cut a shallow “X” into the top of bread to help it expand in the oven.
  3. The video really helps to understand what's going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13Ah9ES2yTU
  4. From NYTimes article:
    1. The dough is so sticky that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits in a covered bowl, undisturbed, for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped (I mean in 30 seconds), and allowed to rise again, for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked. That’s it.
    2. What makes Mr. Lahey’s process revolutionary is the resulting combination of great crumb, lightness, incredible flavor — long fermentation gives you that — and an enviable, crackling crust, the feature of bread that most frequently separates the amateurs from the pros. My bread has often had thick, hard crusts, not at all bad, but not the kind that shatter when you bite into them. Producing those has been a bane of the amateur for years, because it requires getting moisture onto the bread as the crust develops.
    3. It turns out there’s no need for any of this. Mr. Lahey solves the problem by putting the dough in a preheated covered pot — a common one, a heavy one, but nothing fancy. For one loaf he used an old Le Creuset enameled cast iron pot; for another, a heavy ceramic pot. (I have used cast iron with great success.) By starting this very wet dough in a hot, covered pot, Mr. Lahey lets the crust develop in a moist, enclosed environment. The pot is in effect the oven, and that oven has plenty of steam in it. Once uncovered, a half-hour later, the crust has time to harden and brown, still in the pot, and the bread is done. (Fear not. The dough does not stick to the pot any more than it would to a preheated bread stone.)
You could leave a comment if you were logged in.
recipes/no-knead_bread.txt · Last modified: 2020/04/22 10:25 by jmarcos
CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Driven by DokuWiki Recent changes RSS feed Valid CSS Valid XHTML 1.0