No Knead Bread
By: jim Morrison
Published: Monday, November 30, 2009 - 1:39pm

Ingredients




3 cups of All Purpose Flour or Bread Flour
1 3/4 cups of room temperature water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Preparation

1 Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl. 2 Add water and mix all ingredients together with a spoon to incorporate water and dry ingredients. 3 Cover bowl with plastic wrap, wait 12 to 20 hours. 4 Line a bowl with a cotton towel, (not terry cloth) and sprinkle liberally with corn meal or oat bran. 5 Scrape the risen dough from the bowl onto a heavily floured surface, and dust the top of the dough with flour.Fold the dough over itself 3 or 4 times towards the center. 6 Place the dough seam side down in the towel lined bowl and dust  with flour or corn meal, then cover with a towel. Let rise at room temperature 2 hours. 7 Preheat a heavy metal dutch oven (cast iron, copper or enameled cast iron are all good) and the lid too, or Pyrex  for 30 minutes at 500F or as high as your oven will go. 8 Flip dough from towel into hot dutch oven, seam side up, and give it a shake to settle the dough evenly in the pot. Put the hot lid on, and bake in the oven for 30 minutes, then take the pot lid off, set lid aside, and continue baking for another 15 to 20 minutes without the lid on the bread. The bread crust should be a deep chestnut brown. 9 Remove bread from pan and cool on rack, or for crisper crust,. turn off oven, and let bread rest in the cooling oven on the oven rack.

About


Originally from the Sullivan St bakery, New York City, made famous by writer Mark Bittman, from the New York Times.
This recipe makes a better loaf of bread than 90% of the bakeries in the United States can produce. It's classic flour water salt and yeast,  time, not kneading,  does the work.  I've been making bread for over 15 years, and nothing I've made so far is as good as this. It's so simple a child can do it.  The result is amazing, crisp crackly crust on the outside, and a chewy interior crumb full of irregular big holes. It's the holy grail of bread recipes. Pass it on.

Comments:
jim Morrison

Many people think the 1/4 tsp of yeast can't possibly be right, but it is. That's all you need. Most other bread recipes use 6 to 8 times the amount of yeast, but that's for the typical knead and fast rise method. Forget what you usually do, this is a whole new way for home bakers to make bread, and that's saying a lot!