I have to brag a little bit. This is my first loaf of bread and I nailed it. Sure, I’ve made Irish soda bread and various scones but this is real bread, like the kind you can buy in a store.
Homemade bread just seemed like something I didn’t need to spend time on, all that figuring out of the yeast, the rise time, the mixing, the kneading. I had better things to do than sitting around the house waiting for bread to rise.
Until I suddenly had a lot more time to sit around the house when we packed up all our things at the office Friday, March 13 and headed for home – for a really, really long time.
I was sort of nonplussed at first, thinking this couldn’t last. My husband, Eric, had the opposite reaction. He started buying up toilet paper, paper towels, pasta, soup, at the first whiff of change in the wind.
“I picked you up a bag of flour!” he announced one Tuesday evening a million years ago (OK, it was two weeks ago) when he staggered through the door with bags of groceries, including packets of dried pasta meals that I immediately announced I would never eat. “Thanks?” I remember saying, silently laughing to myself. It takes me about a year to get through a bag of flour, and that’s mostly used to make chocolate chip cookies or banana bread. I prefer to make my scones with self-rising flour.
But as one day stretched to the next with not much to tell one from the other except for the most mundane happenings – one day the sun came out, another morning I almost spilled my coffee when two enormous turkeys strolled through our tiny back yard – I suddenly thought it might be nice to bake bread.
I had a vague memory of reading about the easiest bread recipe ever, one that required no kneading. From what I can tell, it was Mark Bittman who first introduced home cooks at large to this recipe through the pages of The New York Times in, I think, 2005. (If you have a subscription, go read and it watch the video here. If you don’t, don’t worry I’m about to give it to you.)
Recipes are the best kind of viral – even though that word is anxiety producing these days. You can’t copyright lists of ingredients (just the text around it) and that’s how recipes get shared hand to hand. The rise of food bloggers around 2008 have only helped to send viral recipes around the globe.
This recipe is not only easy to make it is the perfect bread recipe to fit in between Zoom calls, give you something to look forward to tomorrow, and yes, enjoy all the warm smells as you bake it.
Here’s how it went down in my house:
12:00 p.m. Dash to grocery store #1 during lunch. Discover flour has been swept clean from shelves. Discover yeast has also bought out. Despair slightly. Buy many more items we probably don’t need because I’m there and I might as well.
1:00 p.m. Go to grocery store #2. No flour! (But that’s OK, remember, because my prescient (he asked me to add “and handsome”) husband had already bought me a bag of flour). Find instant yeast!! Find cornmeal!! Happy dance in aisle. Buy a few more things, just because, to celebrate.
2:00-5:00 p.m. Zoom calls for the rest of the day.
5:00 p.m. Mix three ingredients together, plus water (flour, salt, yeast).
THE NEXT DAY
10:00 a.m. After morning Zoom calls, flip the bread over once or twice. Let it rise.
11:30 a.m. Preheat oven.
12:00 p.m. Put bread in the oven. Delight in heavenly bread smells, the kind that realtors will pay top dollar for when holding open houses.
1:00 p.m. Discover I am a breadmaking natural genius talent baker!!
2:00 p.m. Eat an enormous warm slice with butter, jam, along with my afternoon tea. Break into song to the annoyance of family, “Tea with jam and bread! Jam and bread! Jam! And! Bread!”
Anyway. I posted my photos on Facebook and Instagram and the comments were, “Recipe, please?”
So, here you go people. You can do it!
No-Knead Bread
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon granular yeast
1-3/4 teaspoons salt
1-1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons water
1. Cornmeal for sprinkling. Combine flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl. Stir in water till the mixture is blended. The dough will be loose and wet. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise at room temperature 12 to 19 hours – the longer the better.
2. Flour a work surface and turnout the dough on it. Flour your hands and sprinkle the top of the dough lightly with flour. Turn the dough over on itself a couple times and then let it rest 15 minutes. Form the dough into a ball using as little flour as possible. The dough will seem somewhat fluid but it will form a ball. (It’s tempting to use a lot of flour here but don’t. The dough should stay moist.)
3. Place the dough seam-side down on a smooth-surfaced towel sprinkled with cornmeal. Lightly dust the top of the dough with flour or cornmeal, then cover it. Let the dough rise till doubled (about 2 or 3 hours).
4. At least a half hour before the dough has finished rising, place a Dutch oven with a lid in the oven and preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Remove the pot from the oven and carefully turn over the dough and place it in the Dutch oven. Then shake the pot to distribute the dough evenly. Replace the lid and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake another 10 to 15 minutes or until the top is golden and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped.
– Adapted from The New York Times
