Minimalist No-Knead Bread Technique (Part 2)

[dougal]

... my gripe with Bittman's "even faster" minimalist bread, which is that to make it faster he has decided, "Just add more yeast!" Yes, well you can add more yeast to make bread even faster, but again you've just compromised the "minimalist" bread even more. Adding yeast will get your bread to rise faster, but it will invariably dumb down the result, giving you not an even blander bread, but more than likely a bread tasting more like yeast, possibly a sort of unpleasantly acidic (for lack of a better word) after taste.

←

I'd just add that adding more yeast will also have the effect of making the resulting bread go stale faster.

Making bread (like vintage wine or matured Whisky) is something where time is a quality ingredient.

Cut the time, and generally you cut the quality.

Supermarket white sliced is actually made rather quickly. No surprise there!

[sanrensho]

So, I dunno. For me? This isn't progress, it's a step backward for home cooks looking to produce good bread on their own.

I think the idea is to get people away from buying mediocre bread and baking again. And perhaps act as a gateway to making other breads such as using sponges/bigas, sourdough, etc. If not, it's good to simply get people baking bread again.

I've never actually made the no-knead recipe (I don't have a suitable vessel), but it inspired me to start baking bread, chiefly from the "No Need to Knead" book. And that was a gateway toward exploring the whole gamut of breads from sourdough and sponge-based breads to enriched breads. All of which I now bake on a regular basis.

Edited October 7, 2008 by sanrensho (log)

[jgm]

So, I dunno. For me? This isn't progress, it's a step backward for home cooks looking to produce good bread on their own.

←

When it comes to cooking and baking, for most of us, there are necessary compromises.

I do appreciate your voice of dissent, to point out that the long-time way of baking bread remains the best we've been able to come up with. We easily forget the "old" ways of doing things, and I believe they are worth preserving. They're part of our heritage.

However, for many people, Bittman's bread is a revelation. For years, I looked for ways to make my own bread, given my work schedule and the other demands on my time and attention. I went through loaf after loaf of failed -- but sometimes very tasty -- French bread, and those efforts usually consumed most of a weekend afternoon, as well as several hours during the week for researching the reasons for the failures. Along comes Bittman with his very do-able recipe, and suddenly we were able to have bread that was much better than anything we could buy, and didn't cost $3 per loaf, not to mention the gas involved in getting to the bakery. Bittman's bread is do-able, reliable, and probably the best possible compromise for me. It remains a definite step forward for me and will be, for some time.

As for myself, I'd like to see you start your own thread about your bread... with recipes, of course! We already have a dinner thread, a lunch thread, a breakfast thread, and a dessert thread. I'd love to see what you're doing.

[devlin]

So, I dunno. For me? This isn't progress, it's a step backward for home cooks looking to produce good bread on their own.

←

As for myself, I'd like to see you start your own thread about your bread... with recipes, of course! We already have a dinner thread, a lunch thread, a breakfast thread, and a dessert thread. I'd love to see what you're doing.

←

What am I doing?...

http://www.thevillagebakeryonline.com/

I'd give you recipes, but then I'd have to kill you....

eta: I hope the spirit in which that was intended isn't lost on the department of homeland security.

Edited October 8, 2008 by devlin (log)

[jgm]

Gorgeous breads, gorgeous website.

I've picked up the book about making 'artisan' breads in 5 minutes a day (I think there's another thread about that book specifically; I haven't read any of it yet but plan to). Other than the methods listed in that book, are there ways for the home baker who spends 8+ hours a day at work, to make the kind of product that would be on a par with what you produce? My problem is time. The original schedule of about an 18-20 hour rise works really well for me. And I think the idea in the 'artisan' book, which involves making a dough and using it over a period of several days, is certainly within reach.

Other than that... what are my options? Is there a way to blend the kind of thing you do, with the long-rise, minimal kneading technique that Bittman wrote about? I could work with a dough in the morning, and in the evening. But working with it any more often than that is not something I'm going to be able to do.

...unless I could take it to work with me and work with it on my lunch hour. (My current employer would be fine with that.) Do rising doughs travel well?

[Emily_R]

Mark Bittman played around with the no-knead bread recipe and has come up with faster no-knead bread and whole grain no-knead bread.  You might have to register to read the article, and the recipes are linked in the side-bar.

The whole grain bread, by the way, is 100% non-white flour!

←

I tried his whole grain no-knead bread recipe two days ago and got a big leaden doorstop. Terrible.

[devlin]

Gorgeous breads, gorgeous website.

I've picked up the book about making 'artisan' breads in 5 minutes a day (I think there's another thread about that book specifically; I haven't read any of it yet but plan to).  Other than the methods listed in that book, are there ways for the home baker who spends 8+ hours a day at work, to make the kind of product that would be on a par with what you produce?  My problem is time.  The original schedule of about an 18-20 hour rise works really well for me.  And I think the idea in the 'artisan' book, which involves making a dough and using it over a period of several days, is certainly within reach.

Other than that... what are my options?  Is there a way to blend the kind of thing you do, with the long-rise, minimal kneading technique that Bittman wrote about?  I could work with a dough in the morning, and in the evening.  But working with it any more often than that is not something I'm going to be able to do.

...unless I could take it to work with me and work with it on my lunch hour. (My current employer would be fine with that.)  Do rising doughs travel well?

←

Taking dough to work would be a tedious exercise, it seems to me. There are other ways.

I just wrote a long thing to you here and then hit something and poof, gone....

Anyway, I think you can replicate what I do, but it takes practice more than anything. Once you've taught yourself (and that's precisely what I did -- I'm self-taught), I suspect you'd be surprised by how much simpler my process is than it might appear.

Don't let the three-day process scare you. You don't have to do it that way for your own purposes, and in fact the "artisan bread in five minutes" approach may be similar in many ways. If I were you, I might start there, but actually I'd sort of prefer people start with something like Dan Lepard's book, The Handmade Loaf.

So in partial answer to your question "Is there an easy way?" etc., yes and no. The biggest challenge in the process is learning how to recognize what your dough is doing, and nobody can tell you exactly how to do that. You have to work with dough enough to figure out how it works best. That's a learning curve that no "recipe" can do for you. In that regard, the traditional, home-baked loaf is sort of fool-proof, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. Something from The Tassajara Bread Book, for example. If you follow something like that, you'll get uniform results without much trouble, except for the kneading and the finding a warm place and the rising and then the bake.

For me, that process is a bigger pain in the neck than the method I use, which is actually pretty similar to Lepard's in many ways, although on a different scale and time frame, only I don't use commercial yeast. And I don't knead at all. I use the stretch and fold method, a thing that worried and scared me for awhile because I wasn't sure I knew what I was doing, but it's really so simple a flatworm could do it.

I started with the Tassajara book, was dissatisfied pretty quickly, moved on to Julia Child's big baking compendium, which was dissatisfying partially because the stuff I wanted to make from that was beyond my ken at the time, then took up Nancy Silverton, who was more helpful, though still I wasn't liking the idea of all that kneading, and the breads I was producing still weren't what I had in mind (and I wasn't even sure I'd ever had any bread like what I had in mind), used Reinhart, Hamelman, etc. Still, none of those quite got me there.... At the same time, because I'd been experimenting quite a bit, I learned more over time than I think I'd even realized at the time, and that's part of it.... Time, and practice. You just can't dismiss the significance of those two elements in learning how to make good bread. No one recipe can teach anybody how to make good bread. It's as much an art as it is a science,... and maybe even more so.

I used to teach college English, and it's the same thing. I can help you learn how to deconstruct a sentence and a paragraph and an essay and an argument. I can correct your grammar and your spelling. I can give good advice about making your sentence or paragraph or essay better. I can tell you what's wrong with it. But ultimately you're the one who's got to write it the best way you can. Nobody can really teach you how to write great stuff.

But about bread.... Looking around the internet helped enormously, and I obsessively searched til I found what sounded more to the point in terms of what I was groping around for, a lot of info on strictly sourdough leavening, discovering Alan Scott and then Jackal here at egullet, both of whom nudged up my understanding of what I could do on my own to a whole nother level. I'd look up his tutorial here, if I were you. It seems really complex and complicated, if you've never worked with sourdough, and in many facets I guess it is, but once you become familiar with the various elements and the technique, it's actually supremely simple. And that's the wonder of it. It was a major breakthrough for me. Together with Ed Wood's Classic Sourdoughs book which is enormously helpful insofar as offering tutorials on how to care for a sourdough culture.

Those sources really challenged me to learn how to make the best bread I know how to make. It wasn't easy. It took time. It was maddening and often totally disheartening. In the long run, it pushed me right up to a whole nother level of understanding how making really good bread is actually not that difficult. Of course it would have been easier had I had someone standing next to me saying, "That's wrong," or "That's good," or "Do it this way," etc. If women still baked bread the way they used to? Before the advent of commercial yeast? I suspect more of us would come by it more naturally than we do today.

Anyway.... Can you replicate what I do in a scaled down time-frame? I think you can. I've never done it to quite that extent, but Jackal and others have discussed this around here a lot. If I were you, I'd look up Jackal's tutorial and also get Lepard's book and start there. If you want really good bread, I don't think it's possible using Bittman's minimalist and super-minimalist approach. You'll get a home-baked loaf that is marginally more interesting than what we're most of us accustomed to, but not much more.

To get anything like what people like Jackal and I and others here produce, you have to bump up your learning curve a bit, be willing to experiment and practice and spend some concentrated time up front.

In one of several possible scenarios, that might mean making a starter one night before bed and leaving it til you get home from work the next day at which time you could work with it in one of a number of possible ways. You could make the final dough according to one of the recipes in Lepard's book and then bake it that night, or you could put the shaped loaves in the refrigerator and bake them the next day. For a longish process like that, you'd start with much cooler water than you might be used to, and very small amounts of yeast because you want the leavening to work slowly rather than quickly, which will give you more flavorful breads, and as Dougal suggested above, bread with better keeping qualities. Anything warm and fast will yield a bland bread that will dry out in about the time it takes to cool from the bake. You might try Reinhart's Ancient Bread, for example, which works with ice-cold water and a tiny amount of yeast.

You could also double or triple a batch of dough you like, bake it off and then freeze the loaves and refresh them. That would simplify the whole thing by just allowing a concentrated chunk of work to produce a bigger batch and so you wouldn't have to do it that often and you'd have bread in the freezer waiting.

But anyway, the 5 minute approach sounds like a good option and may actually be similar to what I'm suggesting above (I don't know for certain, and I've never tried it), and also Lepard offers some fairly expedient options for making good bread. Try his barm or his maize. They're actually very doable and fairly simple (especially when you do them a few times), and it's good bread.

Sorry for the length. Hope that didn't annoy you beyond measure.

Edited October 8, 2008 by devlin (log)

[jgm]

Annoy me? Not at all. Answers like that, in fact, are the reason I love eGullet. People here are passionate and generous.

Thank you for an extremely generous answer!

[sanrensho]

Other than that... what are my options?

What kind of breads are you specifically aiming for?

For breads that use commercial yeast (no sponge, straight method), you can mix and knead in the evening then proof overnight. Take out of the fridge when you get home from work and leave out for 1-2 hours (depends on your ambient temp). When the dough has warmed up somewhat, deflate and shape. Final proof for say another hour, then bake.

For sponges, you could do an overnight sponge, then mix in the morning and proof in the fridge. Do as for above when you get back from work. (Leave out to warm up, deflate, shape and final proof.

For sourdough, assuming you have an active starter and depending on your ambient temps, you can refresh your starter first thing in the morning before work. When you get home, mix and shape, then proof (in my case about 4 hours) and bake.

[devlin]

Other than that... what are my options?

What kind of breads are you specifically aiming for?

For breads that use commercial yeast (no sponge, straight method), you can mix and knead in the evening then proof overnight. Take out of the fridge when you get home from work and leave out for 1-2 hours (depends on your ambient temp). When the dough has warmed up somewhat, deflate and shape. Final proof for say another hour, then bake.

For sponges, you could do an overnight sponge, then mix in the morning and proof in the fridge. Do as for above when you get back from work. (Leave out to warm up, deflate, shape and final proof.

For sourdough, assuming you have an active starter and depending on your ambient temps, you can refresh your starter first thing in the morning before work. When you get home, mix and shape, then proof (in my case about 4 hours) and bake.

←

Those are really good options, and I wish more people would take the time to try those sorts of methods. In the long run, those methods will yield better bread than the super fast Bittman minimalist bread, more flavorful and with better keeping qualities, and once you do it a few times, it actually isn't that much more complicated or time-consuming than Bittman's approach. Most of the on-hands work, either way, is mixing and shaping, which you have to do with any bread. The bulk of the time is, well, time passing as you wait to bake.

And for me, I'd rather mix up a starter (what, five minutes max?), let it sit overnight (nothing I have to do, just let it sit), then mix the dough (another 5 minutes?), let rise or put in fridge (again, nothing for me to do), and then work the dough as you like, which, depending on your schedule, will amount to the time it takes to maybe stretch and fold over 2 to 4 hours (again, 5 minutes max each stretch and fold), shape (same thing), rise and then stick in the oven.

Easy peasy.

[aonis]

I'm sorry if this sounds foolish, but I've been working with this no-nead recipe for awhile now and I can never get my dough to really rise.

I start in the evening with:

3c flour (King Arthur, white, unbleached)

1 1/2 cups of water

1 1/2 tsp of sea salt

1/8 tsp of yeast (RIZE)

I leave it overnight in the oven with light on and in the morning all of bubbles have developed and there seems to be some nice activity going on, accompanied by a lovely yeasty smell.

When I prepare for my second rise, I turn it out onto a floured surface and fold it a few times and onto a clothed baking tray it goes covered into the oven again (for warmth). This is where things become strange. The doughs always spread out and expand, but the they never go upwards.

I always imagined the doughs rising as though they were inflated and I'm not seeing that here. When I toss it into my dutch oven it just spreads out and ends up delicious but thin.

What am I doing wrong!?

I've tried forcing it into a smaller dutch oven, say 4 quart, but that feels like cheating.

please help......

[BarbaraY]

Have you tried making a couche for it. I use floured dish towels and shape the couche and let it rise on the counter. Don't use terry cloth towels but flour sack.

[Gayle28607]

I hope experienced eGullet members will feel it's better to resurrect this wonderful old thread rather than beginning a new one. I've put my question here as it's about working on methods for the Bittman/Lahey no-knead bread.

Way back on the first page of this thread people were talking about maybe using parchment to avoid too much sticking and too much deflation of the loaf on the way into the very hot vessel.

Hmmm...I'd like to try out this recipe. The only thing I'm wondering is how well-seasoned a cast iron pot would have to be for this recipe. Mine is reasonably seasoned but I still wouldn't consider the surface appropriate for over-easy eggs.

I'd hate to get to the end and have a stuck loaf. Any thoughts?

←

If you're going with the pot technique and are worried about your cast iron pot, I'd maybe put the dough on parchment paper first and then put it in the pot.

I've been working with this bread for a while now, using many of the suggestions found in this thread, mostly those focused on flavor. (Saving a bit of dough from a previous loaf to add to the current, 1.5 tsp of salt, using some wheat or rye, and so on.) The flavor is very good now, as is the texture.

I'm trying something different today, though, because about 50% of the time I have a loaf that sticks to the Le Creuset pot. I up-end the pot on the cooling rack, and eventually the loaf falls out. This is okay, but I'd rather be able get the loaf out right away. The last time I made this particular loaf, which subs 3/4 c of whole grain ground rye for 3/4 of a cup of bread flour, I put some olive oil on the surface of the boule, then left it to rise. This made no difference in sticking to the LC, but it did make the crust different in a way I don't care for. So that's out.

So today I am trying parchment- a fairly big piece. If I had cut a piece the size of the bottom of the LC pot, I would never get the dough from the proofing bowl to the pot. The dough is very soft and sticky. This is what it looks like after a long rise. (It rested at 80 degrees for about 20 hours.)

After pouring from the bowl for the 15 minute rest on the board, you can see how fluid it still is. I always just fold it with the spatula, both sides to the center, then end to end.

Now I'm thinking I may end up with a very oddly shaped loaf because it isn't heavy enough to flatten out the parchment in the bowl, and likely won't do that in the hot pot, either. Here's the pot, parchment, and dough in the bowl I use for the final two hour rise. I realized this might not be such a good idea after I put the roughly shaped dough in the bowl and saw how stiff the parchment remains.

I wonder if anyone has any ideas, or has worked through this particular dilemma before and come up with a better solution? I'll bake this in about an hour, and see what I end up with. I'm just not liking the looks of this particular solution.

[Wholemeal Crank]

Could you just fold the parchment carefully into the pot shape *before* you put the pot into the oven and heat it up, then remove it while you heat up the pot, slip the now more or less shaped parchment back into the pot, and pour inthe dough like always?

[prasantrin]

Are you sure your pot is hot enough? I've never had my bread stick to the pot, no matter how sticky the dough was (that said, my pot has only ever been used for no-knead bread, so there's no residue that might encourage sticking). You could cut a circle of parchment and put it in the bottom of the pot right before you put the dough in and then use a pastry cloth or dish cloth to get your dough to the pot.

I never worry about deflation. A little deflation won't make much difference in the final product. I let the dough to its final rise on a dish cloth coated with flour and wheat bran, then use the dish cloth to carry the dough to the pot and dump the dough in from the cloth. You can sort of flip the dough on the cloth, so it will go in the pot the right way (but I never bother with that, either. It doesn't seem to matter too much which way is up). Just make sure you have a lot of flour and wheat bran on the cloth, so the dough won't stick to the cloth.

Edited November 28, 2009 by prasantrin (log)

[Wholemeal Crank]

Are you sure your pot is hot enough?

I've had my dough stick to a well-seasoned cast iron dutch oven thoroughly preheated and measured by my infrared temp gun to 450 degrees.

[prasantrin]

Are you sure your pot is hot enough?

I've had my dough stick to a well-seasoned cast iron dutch oven thoroughly preheated and measured by my infrared temp gun to 450 degrees.

Like I said, my pot has only been used for no-knead bread, so there's no other residue that might encourage sticking. Even a well-seasoned cast iron pot may have residues that may encourage sticking of certain items.

I don't have an infrared thermometer, but I leave my Le Creuset in a 300C convection oven for 45-60 minutes (or till whenever I get around to putting my bread in). IIRC, the hotter the oven and pot the better, especially for that initial impact of the dough.

[Gayle28607]

Could you just fold the parchment carefully into the pot shape *before* you put the pot into the oven and heat it up, then remove it while you heat up the pot, slip the now more or less shaped parchment back into the pot, and pour inthe dough like always?

This might be a good solution to try. I think this will be my next attempt. I pulled the parchment out of the pot, believe it or not, at 30 minutes. I ended up with the whole loaf on the stone, sans pot, sans parchment at that point, and finished baking it that way for the final 15 or 20 minutes. It is oddly shaped though, as I feared it might be. Lots of ridges and folds.

[Gayle28607]

Are you sure your pot is hot enough? I've never had my bread stick to the pot, no matter how sticky the dough was (that said, my pot has only ever been used for no-knead bread, so there's no residue that might encourage sticking).

I wonder if residue is the issue? I have used the LC pot for many, many other things for many years. It's clean, but who knows? I know the oven is hot - I start at 500 degrees and turn it down after the dough is in the pot. I use a thermometer. But this is the only pot I've ever used for this recipe. Maybe I should try a new one and devote it to only this task? I hate to do that in some ways as I usually make all my cookware do many jobs.

I never worry about deflation. A little deflation won't make much difference in the final product. I let the dough to its final rise on a dish cloth coated with flour and wheat bran, then use the dish cloth to carry the dough to the pot and dump the dough in from the cloth. You can sort of flip the dough on the cloth, so it will go in the pot the right way (but I never bother with that, either. It doesn't seem to matter too much which way is up). Just make sure you have a lot of flour and wheat bran on the cloth, so the dough won't stick to the cloth.

What I've usually done is sort of scrape it into the pot from my board. I've avoided the cloth. And, I agree that deflation doesn't seem to be an issue though I've tried to avoid it. The dough has always had great oven-spring.

[Gayle28607]

Are you sure your pot is hot enough?

I've had my dough stick to a well-seasoned cast iron dutch oven thoroughly preheated and measured by my infrared temp gun to 450 degrees.

Hmm. Do you use the dutch oven for other things, too?

[prasantrin]

If you use a cloth, you don't have to scrape. I think scraping leads to more oddly-shaped bread (though that doesn't really bother me, either), and I've found my dough is harder to get off a well-floured plastic board than a well-floured cloth.

I don't really know if residue makes a difference to the non-stick qualities of the pot, but I prefer err on the safe side. If you coat a nonstick pan with baking spray, The residue tends to made the pan become non-stick, for example. And non-stick isn't non-stick for everything in my experience (some things baked in a non-stick pan, for example, will still stick), and dough is quite a different substance from foods you'd normally cook in a pot. It makes sense (to me) that it may react differently.

Without adding any fat, does something like pancakes stick to you pot if you use it on the stove?

[Gayle28607]

If you use a cloth, you don't have to scrape. I think scraping leads to more oddly-shaped bread (though that doesn't really bother me, either), and I've found my dough is harder to get off a well-floured plastic board than a well-floured cloth.

I don't really know if residue makes a difference to the non-stick qualities of the pot, but I prefer err on the safe side. If you coat a nonstick pan with baking spray, The residue tends to made the pan become non-stick, for example. And non-stick isn't non-stick for everything in my experience (some things baked in a non-stick pan, for example, will still stick), and dough is quite a different substance from foods you'd normally cook in a pot. It makes sense (to me) that it may react differently.

Without adding any fat, does something like pancakes stick to you pot if you use it on the stove?

The pot in question is a 2 1/2 or 3 quart Le Creuset enameled cast iron casserole. It's always been my small "go-to" pot. It's mostly been used for sauteing savory things that wind up in a small stew or soup simmered in that same pot. My bet is that a pancake would stick to it like crazy. The bread has been so different than a pancake though. As I mentioned up thread, about half the time the bread releases perfectly, and the other half it only sticks for a while in a limited area on the bottom.

I really appreciate your discussion of the well-floured cloth. I have a pastry cloth that I only use for pastry. Sounds like I need to do the same thing for bread. Intuitively, I thought the well-floured board would stick less than a cloth. It does make it easy to move the dough across the room and into the super hot pot.

[agray]

I like the idea of Prasantrin's - putting a circle of parchment on the bottom of the pot, like you'd do baking a layer cake. Then you only have to worry about it sticking to the sides. I use parchment for pizza all the time and never have any issues with the rather wet dough I use releasing from the paper when it cooks.

I just made a loaf of this today and it came out of the pot with no problems at all, but this is a new, enamelled pot, so we'll have to see what happens after a few years of stews etc...

[Gayle28607]

I think my next loaf will go in with a round of parchment on the bottom of the pot. This may be the simplest solution. I'm also going to keep my eye out for a good deal on something about the same size as the LC casserole that I would then use only for bread baking, as much as I hate to have something that big that is single use.

I've also read with interest about people's positive experiences baking without a pot, directly on a stone, with water for steam on the floor of the oven. If that worked as well for me as it seems to work for other people it would certainly remove the pot issue! The simplicity of the no-knead process with the pot has worked so well, and produced such a consistently delicious loaf, even with a little sticking, that I've been loath to stray too far from it.

I am going to try using a cloth, too, at some point.

[agray]

I'd be curious to see what happens with the parchment round.

As for baking on a stone, I regularly make baguettes using Peter Reinhart's Pain a L'Ancienne recipe from the Bread Baker's Apprentice; it's a very similar dough - wet, no-knead, though it is fermented overnight in the fridge rather than at room temperature. When you're ready to bake, you take it out and let it warm up for 2-3 hours, but it doesn't have a second rise. Instead, you cut it roughly into 6-8" lengths, put it on parchment and then bake it on a stone with both water in a pan underneath and spraying the sides of the oven with a spray bottle. They're amazing, and they do spring up nicely into rustic baguette shapes. I've got a few photos here showing this: http://www.cookbooker.com/blog/2009/10/22/pain-alancienne-baguettes/

This is quite comparable to what you're talking about - I wonder, however, if this rather slack dough will spread out too much on a stone if it's in one large boule-type mass? Baguettes don't have to rise too much. Hmm, maybe I'll give it a shot and see...