Yes, that ridiculously easy, amazingly delicious bread: No-knead Bread

Five or six ingredients, including water, and no kneading, no fuss, produce a bread you’ll be happy to eat and proud to serve. Recipe—and a lively buttermilk variation—below.

HELLO. PRINCE AND PRINCESS OF PROCRASTINATION HERE, reporting from the land of quarantine. Finally, what? 14? years after Mark Bittman published the no-knead bread recipe in The New York Times, the single most popular recipe that paper has ever run, we’ve gotten around to making it.

In doing so, we learned what pretty much every other baker in the world knows. This recipe is ridiculously easy and it is brilliant. As Bittman says, it is spectacular. People have been baking for thousands of years, yet this is a true innovation. With not much more than five ingredients (including the water), an oven, and 24 hours, you get a loaf of bread that is gorgeous and fragrant, with a lovely crust, a open crumb and terrific flavor. It’s great for sandwiches. It’s great for toast. The result is so glamorous and useful and the whole setup is so preposterously simple and Lazy Man’s (or Woman’s) Way to Riches that when we just look at the bread, we start laughing.

Bittman points out that this approach to bread making was first developed by Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City, whose goal was to help people make a beautiful loaf of bread at home. It’s pretty much the opposite of a lot of what had been happening in the 90s, with home bakers exploring fancy ovens, fancy things to put in your oven (such as tiles and steels), proofing baskets, imported flours…. this recipe is the opposite of that. It doesn’t sneer at all those worthy explorations. It just modestly goes ahead and is awesome.

We have now made this bread three times, tweaking it a couple of different ways. One was slightly upping the amount of yeast, resulting in a slightly airier loaf. And we tried adding a little buttermilk to give it a little tanginess. You’ll find the details in the Kitchen Notes.

Equipmentwise, you do need a 3- to 4-quart lidded Dutch oven. In our case, we used our beautiful Staub French oven, recently acquired during some late night, quarantine-inspired, slightly inebriated shopping. Nous ne regrettons rien.

If you’ve been baking bread this way for, oh, more than a decade, go ahead and mock us. If, like us, you are new to this technique, well, try it. Do it. Be ready for mind blown.

Print Pin

No-Knead Bread

Five or six ingredients, including water, and no kneading, no fuss, produce a bread you'll be happy to eat and proud to serve.

Course Bread

Servings 1 loaf

Equipment

• Large bowl, 3 – 4 quart Dutch oven or other deep oven-safe pot with a lid, a lint-free dish cloth or tea towel (not a terry towel) OR a silpat

Ingredients

• 4 cups flour (plus more, as needed—see Kitchen notes)
• scant 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast (plus a tiny bit more, if desired—see Kitchen Notes)
• 1-1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons olive oil (optional—see Kitchen notes)
• 2 cups water (or 1-1/2 cups water + 1/2 cup buttermilk—see Kitchen Notes))
• 2 to 3 tablespoons cornmeal, semolina or bran for dusting (optional—see Kitchen notes)

Instructions

• Mix the flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl with a fork. Add olive oil, if using, and 2 cups of water (at about 70ºF—see Kitchen Notes). Stir with a wooden spoon until everything is mixed together—the dough should be sticky and shaggy. If it seems dry, add a tiny bit more water. Conversely, if it's not quite shaggy, add a little more flour.
• Cover it with plastic wrap, or waxed paper, and let it sit for about 18 hours. Just let it sit there. It may take an hour or two less if your kitchen is on the warm side, and a bit longer if your kitchen runs cold. The dough is ready for the next phase when the top is dotted with bubbles.
• Lightly flour a work surface. Pour the dough onto it (you may have to gently scrape it out of the bowl) and just fold it over a couple of times. Just pick up one side and fold it across and then do the same to the perpendicular side. The dough should be quite soft but not particularly sticky. If it is sticky, sprinkle it with flour and work it into the dough—the goal is that it doesn't stick to your hands or the surface. Put the plastic wrap on top of it and let it sit for 15 or 20 minutes.
• Shape the dough into a ball. You will probably need to add just a little flour to keep the dough from sticking. Generously coat the tea towel with cornmeal (or just use a silicon baking mater). Set the dough on it, seam side down, and dust with more cornmeal.
• Cover lightly with plastic wrap, waxed paper or another tea towel, and let sit for 2 more hours, until it has about doubled in size. You will know it is ready when you poke the top and the indentation doesn’t quickly fill in.
• Two things at once warning: about 90 minutes into this process, turn on your oven to 450ºF and put the Dutch oven, including the cover, in it to heat up.
• When the dough is ready, take out the Dutch oven, set it someplace heatproof—just the stovetop is fine, and remove the lid. Pick up the dough and roll it into the pot, seam side up. Don’t worry if it lands weird or looks catawampus. It will straighten out. (See Kitchen notes.) Straightaway, put the lid on the pot and put it in the oven.
• Bake the bread for 30 minutes, then take off the lid and bake about another 18 to 25 minutes until it is beautifully golden brown. Take the pot out of the stove, and promptly remove the bread to a cooling rack. Bittman recommends using tongs or a spatula, but I just rolled it onto its side and grabbed it fast with my stubborn hand.
• Let it cool. Done.

Kitchen Notes

What kind of flour? How much? We used 3 cups of Gold Medal unbleached white flour and 1 cup of Trader Joe’s white wheat flour, because those are what we have on hand. You can use any combination of those. When we can get rye flour, I will try a bit of that in the mix.

You will need some extra to dust the counter and possibly to reduce the stickiness of the dough. In practice, this can vary quite a bit. Just rely on touch and not how much flour you have to work into the dough to make it not sticky, and work it in thoroughly.

The olive oil. You can omit the oil entirely. I do like a bit of olive oil, though.

Yeast, warm water, etcetera. Novice bakers, take note that yeast needs a gentle warmth to grow and produce the bubbles that rise your bread—70º F is good. If the water is too cold—or too hot—the yeast will die. Regarding amounts, we've made it with 1/2 teaspoon of yeast and gotten a delicious, dense bread. We've also made it with 1/2 + 1/8 teaspoon of yeast, which made the bread just slightly airier while still remaining sturdy for slicing and using.

Dough into pot. When you roll the dough into the Dutch oven, cornmeal is going to go all over the place. It is going to be one royal mess. This is probably the most onerous part of this whole process, which is to say, no big deal.

The aforementioned cornmeal. It serves to help the bread easily release from the Dutch oven and adds a nice textural element, much as it does on the bottom of pizza crust. If you don't have it or don't wish to use it, slightly oil the inside of the Dutch oven before putting the dough in it.

Buttermilk variation. Seeking a little bit of tanginess in this already delicious bread, we substituted 1/2 cup buttermilk for 1/2 cup of the water, using 1-1/2 cups water and 1/2 cup buttermilk. The resulting bread didn't taste like buttermilk at all, but the buttermilk created chemical reactions with the other ingredients that brought its flavor to life.