No-Knead Sourdough Bread: The Glorious(ly easy) Rematch

It would come as no news at all to those who know me that I am a stubborn, stubborn sort.

If something defies me, I will hammer at it until I have gotten it.  That goes for most things I have encountered so far, with the notable exception of tennis.  Notable because after having had friends and an ex-boyfriend try to teach me, owning decent rackets, and having taken a course in it, I frankly, suck at tennis still, for all I would love to play it.  But exceptions only prove the rule, and so it was that the no-knead bread that ought to be easy enough for kiddies to make, had dared to defy me.

Once.

Which, of course, resulted in frantic reading of everything I could find and alternative recipes on the internet, and interrogating bread-baking friends regarding their experiences.  And adjusting the flour/water balance some, and calculating a hydration percentage to check against something a friend had read in this very good book (Swedish, sadly no translation available – but I plan to both, get it and post recipes, so rejoyce!).  And, obviously, more baking.

And boy, did that make a difference!

The bread rose, and it puffed up further in the oven, and the crust crackled gratuitously as it cooled on the rack when it came out – and the crumb… it was truly impressive, just the right amount of moist chewiness and large and well-spaced holes.  This, this is what I had been going after in that previous attempt!  Moreover, I had used 2 teaspoons of dried (and pretty well pounded in a mortar) culinary lavender in the dough, so the aroma was utterly amazing.

If you haven’t ever used lavender in baking, I would really urge you to try – just please, for the love of little green apples, get the culinary-grade one.  You don’t want a mouthful of soap with your bread, and that is what you would be getting if you tried using something out of a potpourri sachet or something intended for a bath preparation!  But, I digress.

Now, after having made all the adjustments, it is a truly lazy-sofa-dweller-easy recipe for gorgeous bread, and the best part is that if you have a sourdough starter, it is also a completely painless, really novice-proof method for sourdough breadmaking.  One that is, arguably, easier than making bread with regular yeast and other methods.  Now, do I have your attention?

If you make it with sourdough starter, it will also keep like a sourdough.  Which is to say it neither molds, nor goes tough outrageously for several days when kept unwrapped, with just the cut side covered in foil, or in one of those neat bread bags that I do not have.  So not only is this easy, it is a good way to make bread that is not in a hurry to go off, making it a good option when you count pennies and do not want to waste what you have bought.  In this case, that is just flour and salt and the optional lavender – sourdough starter, while not free, only needs feeding about once a month if kept in the fridge, so it is virtually free as well.

Behold, the glorious remains of the no-knead bread!

Since my camera was not at home when the bread was cut open originally, and there was daylight around, it was photographed two or three days later, which has done it really no harm!

So, to the recipe (minimal as it is), which is this time NOT adapted from any website, nor do I agree with the original New York Times no-knead bread article – neither about proportions, the time to raise it, nor about the whole proofing-in-towel idea, which is frankly asking for a stuck-dough disaster.

The idea, however, is downright brilliant!

You will need:

• A bowl, a dough spatula, a dutch oven or clay baker or a bottom of a cast-iron casserole and a large steel bowl to cover it (for baking – do NOT preheat the bowl if using).
• To get the pretty stripes and domed shape, a banetton is really helpful.  I imagine you could also raise this bread on a sheet of floured baking parchment or a silpat (non-stick baking mat), and it would turn out fairly decent too.
• If using a banetton, you will need a bit of wheat bran or rye flour or whatever it is you use to powder it before using it for bread to avoid sticking.  I used wheat bran this time.

• Sourdough starter (about 50g, bubbling and awake).  I feed mine with some rye and some wheat flour, it appears to like the combo best, but a pure wheat one will be juuuuust fine!
• 475g bread flour.  I will experiment more with various flours, but pure white bread flour (about 11-12% protein) works fine.
• 1.5-1.75 teaspoon salt.  Iodized table salt works fine, though you can go fancier.  I couldn’t be bothered to grind my sea salt so that is what I used.
• 3.5dl (350ml or 0.35L) cold water.
• 2 teaspoons dried herb of your choice (lavender, oh yes, make it lavender if you have some!), pounded to soft shreds in a mortar.  Bashing is therapeutic you know!  I would say fresh would work too, just make it an even tablespoon then and chop finely instead of pounding.

• Note:  I use a 100% hydration starter so it can be counted as 25g flour and 25g water.  This brings us to 375ml water and 500g flour.  375/500*100=75% hydration.  If you want to adjust the size of the dough, keep the math in mind.  If you just want to use the recipe, it’s a useful thing to remember but not necessary as the quantities are already written above.

What you do:

• Put flour, salt, and any seasoning if using (lavender in my case) into a bowl.  Swirl with a dry whisk to mix.
• Whisk your sourdough starter into your cold water in another bowl.  Trust me you want to do this and not skip this step – since there is barely any mixing, left alone kneading in this method, you want to distribute the starter well into the dry ingredients from the start.  So whisk whisk till it’s all murky water and no large starter blobs clinging to bottom of bowl.
• Pour the water+starter mix into the dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon, silicone spatula or whatever.  It will be shaggy and not appear too wet.  Keep stirring and poking it till most of the flour is incorporated.  Or you can cover it and let it sit 10 min to soak through and then stir a bit, pushing bits of dough down the sides of the bowl if any get stuck there.
• Cover with plastic wrap (clingfilm), or put the entire bowl into a plastic bag and seal with a clip.  Put in non-too-cold place in your kitchen.  Doesn’t have to be very warm (don’t stick it on the radiator, but say half a meter from it is good, or on a counter).  Don’t get hung up on temperature as long as your kitchen isn’t freezing cold.
• Leave for about 8-12 hours.  If you do not intend to bake it the same day, leave out for 6-8 hours and then stick the bowl in the refrigerator till the next day.  If your dough was refrigerated, give it about an hour to come to room temperature the day after and then go to next step.
• Flour a board or surface generously and poke the dough out of the bowl onto it.  It will be somewhat sticky but it will not be liquid and it will not actually get stuck to anything.  Or shouldn’t.  It will flatten out some under its own weight.  Flour your hands and sprinkle the top of the dough with a bit of flour too, and do a single stretch-and-fold.
• Powder the top of the folded dough with a bit more flour, cover it with the plastic wrap you used on the bowl (unless it is wet then get a new piece), and leave it be for 30 minutes or so.
• Sprinkle the banetton with wheat bran, or flour a baking parchment/mat.  Pick up your dough, lightly shape it into a ball with your hands, and rest it seam-side down if using banetton, but seam side up if you are using baking parchment or a mat.
• Cover with a towel and allow to rise for 1.5 hours or until approximately 1.5-2 times the size.  About an hour into the rise, pop your dutch oven, pan or clay baker into the oven and begin preheating it to 250C  (yes, that high).
• When the dough is ready and oven is preheated (read this post about safety and handling of really hot cookware for baking!), invert the banetton onto a piece of baking parchment or gently slide the dough off the mat onto baking parchment right-side up (silicone mats are not rated for the sort of temperature we are talking here).
• Take the hot dish out of the oven USING THICK MITTS! and place the baking parchment with dough on it inside.  Edges sticking out are not a problem.  Cover with preheated lid, or the upside-down bowl if using.  Stick back into the oven.
• Bake for 30 minutes covered, then remove the lid or bowl (latter may need a bit of help with a spatula stuck under an edge to lift), reduce heat to 190-200C and bake for a further 15-20 minutes uncovered until the bread is no longer pale.
• Remove from oven and out of the baking dish and cool on rack for 2 hours minimum before cutting.

Trust me, the wait (and lack of effort) is worth it.

Yeast, Flour, Water, Salt – Bread. You should bake it.

Today I will be teaching a friend how to bake bread.

Incidentally, I am also back on the LCHF diet as of yesterday to reconcile myself and the mirror, but there’s no reason for that to deter me – I have one of those Scandinavian-model effortlessly-slim boyfriends, and he can eat all the bread I’ll end up baking.  I’d hate him for having such a figure while eating whatever he likes – and chocolate! – if I didn’t love him so much!  But, I digress.

The friend in question is a single young man, university student, and loves to cook.  And bake.  Or try to – as in his case, and in his own words, his attempts at yeasted bread simply won’t rise and result in a brick.  And we aren’t talking about sourdough-starter bread here, which ok, I admit, can be a temperamental piece of… dough.  So, what could be possibly going wrong – is it the yeast?  No, baking with yeast in Sweden is popular and so the regular supermarket-available fresh yeast it, it works like clockwork.  Is it the other ingredients?  Flour?  No, can’t be – flour here is locally produced and is very, very good, even the plain kind.  Is it something else?  What? – I just told him to come on over with a sack of flour and we’ll bake bread together and see what gives.  You’ll see what gives later or tomorrow is my guess, after we solve the mystery.

So, what’s the deal with baking your own bread at home?  Supermarkets are full of bread, and it – at least superficially – is a fairly cheap grocery item.  Or is it?

Turns out, not really.  Pick up a bag of bread and check the back of it – see how much it weighs and what goes into it.  Then check the price for a bag of flour and some yeast (water and salt aren’t really high-ticket items), and suddenly you realise – it does cost one heck of a lot more than flour.  Even counting yeast.  Even if you buy the higher-priced bread flour with higher protein content.  Store-bought bread tends to be expensive even for the price of the raw materials, and as to the quality you are getting – eh.  In Sweden, the situation is better than in a lot of other countries I’ve lived in, but even here the bread is still… eh.  Some of it is healthy and wholegrain, but then it is either expensive, tastes eh, or both.

And besides, the stuff you get from the shop just doesn’t have that freshly-baked smell as the bakery loaves.  And those are expensive.  We are talking about a small (half-kilo) loaf going for 50 sek (about €5) for the artisan-style stuff.  And, is it better than the things I can make at home after a few months’ practice?  Let’s not pretend here that I am some sort of master baker – I so am not, never taken a baking class in my life, in fact.  Microbiology – yes.  Baking – no.  Though the skills do overlap.

Initial attempts - Stockholm Sourdough 1.1. I dropped the dough because it stuck to the floured towel, and then baked it anyway. Behold, its resulting "rustc" looks!

And the answer is – well, no, it’s not.  It’s about at the level of my initial attempts at baking, and the sourdough bread I’ve produced recently knocks the socks off most things I’ve seen in bakeries.  And if someone as lax at the whole instruction-following as me can manage it, so can you.  Going back to the price question – a 2kg bag of flour makes several loaves – and for the good stuff, it costs about 20 sek (€2).  And even if you count the energy in (some 1-2 sek per loaf in a home oven if I remember correctly), it’s still worth it in price.  Oh, and you can put anything you like in it.  And salt and season it as much as you prefer.  And the effort, especially with minimal modern machinery (we are talking a handheld mixer – I don’t even own a bowl mixer!) – is very, very small.

Not to mention, most bread you’ll bake at home (unless it’s dessert!) will be healthier as it’ll contain better ingredients, less random additives, and almost certainly less sugar.

So, now that we’ve established it’s worthwhile, what stops people from baking?

One of a few things, apparently.  What kept me from baking bread for a long time was that it’s harped about as being difficult.  The kneading is labor-intensive, supposedly, and it can fail to rise, or it can collapse in the oven.  And don’t even think of trying sourdough – that, supposedly, will stink up your endire kitchen, if not the entire house!  The horror!  And all of those rumors conspire to tell you that you shouldn’t bother.  There’s perfectly good bread in the supermarket, after all… Well, that’s a load of what comes out of a cow’s back end, frankly.

Focaccia with Young Garlic, Olives and Sea Salt

Baking bread is easy.  (The more mysterious and fascinating is the case of my friend who’s coming in two hours!)  Before you decide to learn about sourdough like I did a few months ago, you should try commercial yeast – simply because it’s easier.  It’s like a well-trained dog:  you tell it to sit and it does.  You tell it to run, and it does.  You learn and you gain confidence and experience.  Sourdough bread is utterly gorgeous – far superior to the regular commercial-yeast bread in many cases, but well, that’s like taming a wild animal for a pet:  very doable, but takes some understanding of the beast.  Hence, get a dog (commercial yeast), and practice first.

Learning to bake with regular yeast, aside from providing you with lovely fresh bread on reasonably short schedule – accomplishes this – it teaches you to handle living yeast (how to not kill it and make it thrive and rise your bread), and it teaches you to develop gluten.  There are as many methods here as there are bakers – some knead the heck out of it, some use and swear by a bowl mixer, some mix it and then do stretch-and-folds*** and avoid kneading altogether, and I use a handheld mixer with a couple of dough hooks until the dough comes together, and then use stretch-and-folds myself.  Once you have learned these two basics – keeping yeast alive and developing gluten, it’s a short step in patience to proofing your bread (allowing it to rise properly), and a hot oven – and if yours is difficult, you can always ‘cheat’ a better oven with a pizza stone or a cast-iron dutch oven (casserole) if you really want to make it easy.

There are gazillions of yeasted bread recipes around, but if you want mine, there are a couple of really easy ones I’ve posted here, here, and also here.  And by easy, I really mean easy.  And there are, obviously, pictures!

So yes.  Bread.  It’s inexpensive, it’s easy, it’s delicious and you should absolutely make it at home – for your own eating pleasure, the sense of accomplishment, for proving the myths wrong, for the sake of your wallet, and for various friends who’ll love eating it, and if you give them a loaf, will totally adore you for it.  I promise.

*** The link is to a website made by a guy named Mike – a baker in USA – which I found amazingly helpful in learning about baking with sourdough bread from point zero.  It also has a lot of good tips and techniques, and even videos which are wonderful at explaining and troubleshooting your baking process.  It may look like a lot of text, but it’s very worthwhile to those wanting to learn to bake.  Sure, you can get a baking book later, but when starting out – free – and good! – advice, what’s not to like?