An interpretation of the classic Jim Lahey No-Knead bread recipe.

1. Bread
An interpretation of the classic Jim Lahey No-Knead
Bread recipe as published in the New York Times on
November 8, 2006

2. Ingredients
• One cup whole wheat flour
• Two cups bread flour
• 1 ¼ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon Active Dry Yeast
• 1 ½ cups water

3. This is what I use. You can use regular flour
but bread flour gives you a chewier bread.
I typically start my bread early in the evening
so the dough can rise overnight.

4. You need a two quart bowl. Put the dry
ingredients in the bowl: one cup of whole wheat
and two cups of bread flour. One and one quarter
teaspoon of salt (I just heap up one teaspoon) and
1/2 teaspoon of active dry yeast (I use a slightly
heaping 1/2 teaspoon). I keep my yeast in the
refrigerator to keep it fresh.
That is the classic bread recipe - nothing but flour,
water, salt and yeast.

5. One and one/half cups of water. I warm the water in the
microwave oven for 50 seconds which brings the temperature to
about 90-95 degrees F - that is warm enough to really activate
the yeast but not hot enough to kill it.
While the water is warming in the microwave I blend the dry
ingredients in the bowl using a soup spoon, then just pour all
the warm water in on top of the dry ingredients.

6. It looks like this before you start stirring up the dry stuff and the
water.
Now stir with the soup spoon. It will seem like there is not enough
water but you just keep stirring and blending until eventually
everything is wet and you have a coherent ball of dough.

7. This is an intermediate stage of the mixing process.

8. This is the coherent ball.

9. This is the way it looks from the side.

10. I then cover it with a wet cloth (if you don't use a wet cloth
cover, you get a skin on top of the dough) and let it sit for 12
hours (more or less). Temperature matters during this rising
period. A temperature of around 75 degrees is good. I put
mine in the oven and turn on the oven light. One of our
ovens gets too hot (it has two light bulbs) when I do this but
the other oven is just right (it has one light bulb). In the
summer, I just put it on the kitchen table which is the
warmest spot in our house.
Here it is under a wet cloth.

11. Here it is after 12 hours - it roughly doubles in size.

12. There are other ways to finish the bread making process from this
point but I will describe what I do.
I have a polyethylene sheet, designed I think, for making pie
crusts, that I use during the loaf shaping process. I spread
flour onto the polyethylene sheet. I "pour" out the dough
onto the plastic sheeting - I use a plastic spatula to help it
out of the bowl:

13. I divide it into two portions.

14. I flatten them into pancakes. I use flour on my hands to
keep the dough from sticking.
These are kind of rectangular. I make them more round
now and think that works better. It gives a more attractive
loaf shape at the end.

15. I like to sprinkle the dough at this point with Herbes de Province. It
adds a nice aroma and flavor.
A little Rosemary and Thyme is almost as good.

16. Then I roll the pancakes up into "cigars":

17. My baking gear consists of parchment paper (I like the Reynolds
brand) and a perforated French bread pan that came from
Amazon.com

18. I slide the "cigar" onto a a piece of parchment paper that is sized to
fill one side of that baking pan

19. They then go back into that oven with the light on for two more hours for
"proofing" - a little more rise time. You have exposed the yeast to some
new sources of food during all of that shaping so they will generate a
little more gas for you. The above picture is actually after the two hours
of "proofing" time.

20. I sprinkle the top with a little more Herbes de Province

21. I put the baking pan on a cookie sheet and prepare the oven.

22. I put a 8"x8" brownie pan with about 3/4" of water in it on the
bottom shelf of the oven and turn the oven on to 425F. The
moisture in the oven helps give a nice crust. When the oven
is up to temperature, I gently slide the cookie sheet/bread
pan combination onto a shelf that sits in the middle of the
oven and bake for 40 minutes.

23. The bread looks like this when it comes out of the oven.

24. I quickly put them on a rack to cool.

25. The End
After the bread cools, I slice it and divide it into pairs of slices
which I put into a plastic sandwich bag. I put the individual
sandwich bags, each with two slices of bread in it, into a larger
freezer bag and freeze. Every night for dinner, I take out a
sandwich bag and pop the two frozen slices of bread into the
toaster and warm them - I do not toast them.
They taste as fresh as the day I made them that way.
By Don von Schriltz with thanks to Carol Olson.