Experiment: No Knead Bread

Making bread always seems like a difficult task. It usually calls for kneading the dough for multiple times and then you need to let the dough rest for a few times. With everyone’s busy schedule, who has time to make bread for scratch? Well, with the no knead bread recipe, first published by the New York Times, you can let time do the hard work for you. All you need to do is to stir the ingredients together and to bake the dough. Even a four year old can probably make this bread.

Jim Lahey’s No Knead Bread

Ingredients:
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1 5/8 cups water

Directions:

Step 1: Prepare the Dough
1. In a large bowl, combine flour, yeast and salt.
2. Add water and stir everything until blended. Dough will be sticky.
3. Cover bowl with plastic wrap.
4. Let the dough rest for 12-18 hours in a warm room.

The dough will look like this after 12 hours:

Step 2: Work on the Dough
1. Remove the dough from the bowl and put it on a work surface that is slightly covered with flour.
2. Quickly shape the sticky dough into a ball.
3. Cover the dough with a cotton towel and let if rise for about 2 hours.
4. When the dough is ready, it will be more than double in size.

The dough will looks like this after 2 hours:

Step 3: Bake the Dough
1. Half an hour before the dough is ready, preheat oven to 450F.
2. Put a heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats.
3. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven
4. Turn dough over into pot.
5. Shake pan if dough is unevenly distributed.
6. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes.
7. Remove lid and bake another 15-30 minutes, until load is beautifully browned.
8. Cool on a rack.

* Note: Make sure you don’t put your hot ceramic pot or Pyrex pot onto a cold surface. The shock might crack the pot. Unfortunately, it happened to me when I was doing a chemistry experiment long time ago.

The resulting bread doesn’t look too amazing but it tastes pretty good. The crust is very fragrant and the inside is soft and fluffy. This recipe doesn’t take a lot of work but the result is surprisingly good. I will definitely make it again but I think I will bake the bread for the full 30 minutes to make the crust crispier.

You can also checkout this video posted by the New York Times: