I have recently been thinking about learning to bake bread. I am finding the thought a little intimidating. I have no experience, no mixer, no yeast and no idea where to start. This is also the type of challenge that I find very exciting.
I turned to Twitter for help and asked people where I should start. Two people sent me some great places to get started. It turns out that Sufficiency and Bread Experience also have great blogs and are worthy of checking out. Bread Experience is an extensive blog that obsesses (pleasantly) over all things bread, while Sufficiency has a small selection of very well thought out posts on food.
At any rate, Sufficiency sent me to the New York Times to search for a recipe for no-knead bread. A quick search landed me in the lap of the minimalist (aka great writer Mark Bittman) who also has a great short-video series that are have a lot of great info and are a lot of fun.
Bittman created a significant cult following around no-knead bread in 2006. The original video (about 5 minutes is below):
To overly simplify, Bittman shows us how to make bread with no mixing or kneading by inducing a process similar to fermentation to bring the dough together. The advantage is ease of use and reduced labour. The disadvantage is a 12-18 hour waiting time while the process does its magic.
In 2008, Bittman revisited the idea with a quicker way to make the dough, with mixed results:
The rest of the video series is available on the NYTimes site. There are also almost 70 videos on YouTube about No-Knead Bread.
As soon as we have a non-humid free evening, we will start experimenting in the land of bread! Anyone else have tips, recipes or resources related to bread?
making bread is one of the joys of the kitchen! i went for almost 2 full years without having to purchase 1 loaf of bread! (and i eat a lot of bread) sadly my oven broke last summer and that sent me into a downward spiral.
try http://www.thefreshloaf.com – it is a great site for all things bread. and where i learned…
good luck!
[...] 15, 2009 by Joel We originally posted about No-Knead bread back in August. Although the whole world seems to know about it, we were new to hearing of this apparent hit for [...]
[...] bread, we shared the story of Bittman’s unveiling of the technique in New York City in 2006 here and shared our first attempt [...]
[...] different last night – I turned to Jim Lahey’s – yep, the same one who invented No Knead Bread – for pizza advice. The results were [...]