No Knead Bread for a Cold Weekend

It seems like everywhere I turn, I see another recipe for no knead bread. While I don't think kneading is a particularly arduous step in bread-making, I've been intrigued by the idea of this bread. With temperatures predicted in the single digits and teens for the weekend, I figured that bread making would be a good plan.

The process started Friday evening, and I mixed the dough and had it rising by around 5:30. My dough rise location of choice these days is in the microwave. I'm hard pressed to find a place in my home (in Maine, in January) that is a constant 70 degrees. My micro sits over the stove, and has a surface light. When the light is on, the inside of the microwave gets pretty warm. I've never actually checked the temperature in there, but it feels about right.

What makes no knead breads so approachable is that the "active" time involved is all of about 15 minutes. Mixing the dough is un-fussy, then it can rise for 12 - 20 hours. After the first rise, you gather the dough together in a roundish form, plop it in another bowl for rise # 2 (about 2 hours). After the second rise, the bread bakes for about 45 - 60 minutes.

Though the active time is pretty minimal, this isn't a bake it on a whim kind of thing. But really, is any bread baking a spontaneous activity? Quite the opposite, it's more deliberate and planful, which is part of the appeal of it, to me at least. My timeline for this bread was about 20 hours - I started this bread Friday evening, we were sampling it around 1:30 Saturday afternoon.

The dough.

I was pretty happy with how my final product came out, but I have to admit, I was a doubter throughout the process. My dough was probably a bit too wet to start. Sometimes you just have that inkling when you are baking, that something may not be quite right, but then you employ a bit of denial, or faith, depending on your mood. After the first rise, trying to work with the gooey, amorphous blob did not leave me confident about the final loaf. I think I threatened the dough with the trash can at least once.

After the first rise. This rise was about 16 hours.

Ready for the second rise.

Things were not looking better after rise #2. Despite flouring the towel, a fair bit of dough stuck to it. Trash can was considered again as the final resting place, but I figured that at this point I had about 12 minutes of active time invested in the bread, so I thought that I might as well throw it in the pot and in the oven to see what happens. This is the faith part of baking.

Truth be told, my doubt remained even through baking. About half way through the baking time, you take the lid off the pot (this bread cooks in a pot, more about that in the recipe below). It may have been the ugliest bread loaf in progress that I've ever created. However at this point I was committed to a household cu/pu effort (clean up / pick up), and I wasn't quite done. Since I wasn't going anywhere, the bread stayed in the oven to finish baking.

When I took the bread out and moved it to a rack to cool, I was thinking, 'huh, a bit flat, not nearly as attractive as pictures of this type of bread I've seen. But hmmm... it looks worth trying.' I let it cool on the rack for less time than it should have (honestly, I admire those of you who can let baked goods cool for as long as the recommended amount of time). Then we sliced. We oohhed. We sniffed. We ahhed. Tom said, 'get the butter.' The butter, in this case, is  Kate's Homemade Butter It's made here in Maine and if you love butter (and what's not to love about butter?), give this a try.

Ok, so this bread wasn't necessarily glamor-shot worthy. It did have a nice crumb, some good holes, a passable crust. But damn, it tasted good. Give this recipe a try.


No Knead Bread
This recipe first appeared in the New York Times on November 8, 2006. It was adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery.

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.
What to Do:
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups 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.
(A note about a change I made here - as you can see from the picture - I did the second rise a bit differently than the recipe describes. Since my dough was so wet, I was worried that left without any structure for this rise, it would seep and ooze and I'd have a dough that was Kansas-like in it's elevation. I put the dough on the floured towel, then put that into a bowl so it would rise up, rather than out.) 
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.
Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.