No-Sweat Bread

At long-last, I joined the club: I made my first loaf of the sensational no-knead bread, from the Jim Lahey technique popularized by Mark Bittman in the New York Times a couple years ago.

I have always been a little shy about baking. It always seemed like hard science, and I have always seen myself as more of a poet, better suited to the no-measure, dash-of-this-dash-of-that of cooking. In truth, I greatly enjoy science and have been avoiding the oven all these years more from laziness than anything.

Thanks to Lahey and Bittman, however, even laziness is an unworthy excuse. The entire “active” part of the process takes five minutes, if done with absurd deliberation – maybe eight minutes if one adds in the washing-up time. It takes me longer to ride the five kilometers and back to fetch a loaf of exquisite Transylvania Bakery peasant bread than to make one of my own, leaving aside the time the dough is doing its own thing, with no help from me – fermenting, resting, rising, or baking. Way longer.

The no-knead methodology is based on two simple ideas. The first is that, by combining a relatively wet, sloppy dough and a long-ass fermentation opportunity, you get a wonderfully moist, open-structured crumb. The second involves doing the first two-thirds of the high temperature bake within an enclosed dutch oven. Patterned after the ancient French technique of baking within a cloche (clay pot), the dutch oven method traps the steam from the baking bread, providing sufficient humidity within the baking vessel to yield a loaf with a thick, crunchy crust.

There has never been a justification for eating crap bread. But now, there seems little reason to regularly spend $5-8 on decent bread when you can make better-than-decent bread for a tenth of that, with no more effort than it takes to purchase it.