No-knead bread was “the recipe that democratized bread-baking, ” said the cookbook author Peter Reinhart. Credit... Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
It was November 2006, and I was a test cook at Cook’s Illustrated magazine in Brookline, Mass., when I walked over to see what my colleagues were gawking at. It was a loaf of bread that my fellow test cook David Pazmiño had just transferred to a cooling rack. I remember the loud snaps and pops coming from the bread as it cooled, the glossy crust crackling. He cut off a slice, revealing an open, airy hole structure with a moist, custard crumb. It was extraordinary.
“This was the recipe that democratized bread-baking, ” says Peter Reinhart, a chef-instructor at Johnson & Wales University and the author of “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” (Ten Speed Press, 2001).
No Knead Bread — Mark Bittman
As a recipe writer, I consider it a win if I can improve an existing technique, either by making it more simple and foolproof, or by tweaking it to produce markedly superior results. The no-knead bread recipe accomplished both of those goals simultaneously. The process is simple: Mix flour, water, salt and yeast in a bowl just until they all come together. Cover the bowl and let it sit on your counter overnight. The next day, shape it into a loose loaf, let it proof, then bake it inside a preheated Dutch oven with the lid on. That’s it.
“It’s the recipe that gets home bakers hooked on baking, leading them to sourdoughs and natural fermentation and more complicated techniques, ” he said.
Jim Lahey in 2019. Mr. Lahey first saw the no-knead technique in use in the early 1990s.Credit... Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Nycwff
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Mr. Lahey remembers watching as bakers — first food bloggers and amateurs, then newspapers and magazines, and finally professionals with bakeries and book deals — started employing the method, sending him photographs of their work and visiting his Sullivan Street Bakery just to take pictures with him, or to thank him for the recipe.
I myself tested no-knead bread recipes for two months in 2007 as I researched and wrote a piece for Cook’s Illustrated that unapologetically rode on his recipe’s success. (Mr. Lahey recalled, “There was this Cook’s Illustrated article that annoyed me a little when it was published.” I sheepishly told him that I wrote it.)
The technique is by no means a modern one. Mr. Lahey first saw it in use in 1991, while working on a farm in Tuscany, when he was 23. A friend baked him a pizza made from a dough he had formed without kneading the night before, then gently balled up before stretching and baking the next day. Mr. Lahey explored the technique further the next year in Miami, where he had been hired by the restaurateur Joe Allen to open a bakery. There, he noted that the dough lost cohesion as he kneaded and proofed it.
Air Fryer No Knead Bread
An analysis of Miami water indicated high levels of magnesium sulfate, an inorganic salt found in most tap water and used commercially as a fermentation aid. It speeds up the action of amylase, an enzyme that breaks down starches into simple sugars.
“The bread was overproofing, and the solution was to just knead it less, ” he said. “Eventually, I started doing it without kneading it at all, just a few folds here and there to give it some structure.”
Mr. Reinhart, along with other bakers, like Ken Forkish of Ken’s Artisan Bakery and Ken’s Artisan Pizza in Portland, Ore., noted that no- or low-knead techniques were known to many professionals at the time. But, until Mr. Lahey and Mr. Bittman’s article, they had had difficulty explaining its potential to home bakers. “When I saw that article come out, I laughed, because I wish it had been me, ” Mr. Reinhart said.
No Knead Bread (dutch Oven Bread)
He said he learned the technique from Philippe Gosselin, who was known for his baguettes. At the time, Mr. Reinhart added, Parisian bakers like Mr. Gosselin, whose father was also a baker, were just starting to rediscover ancient techniques that had largely been displaced by modern commercial yeast and mixers.
“I remember Gosselin telling me, ‘When I showed my father, he threw me out of the kitchen. It was too out of the box, ’” Mr. Reinhart said, adding that he met extreme resistance to the idea when he brought it with him to the United States and introduced similar concepts in “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.”
By the early 2000s, Mr. Lahey started using what would become his no-knead recipe at a James Beard House dinner themed on an ancient Roman cookbook. Upon reflection and research, Mr. Lahey realized the technique was probably how they made bread in ancient Rome.
Updated No Knead Bread Recipe
Mr. Lahey started using the technique later, at Sullivan Street Bakery, and soon realized that it might be an interesting solution for home bakers, who, he observed, were “placing too much emphasis on kneading and making dough.”
He said he pitched it to Gourmet magazine, then Food & Wine. Finally, he took it to Mr. Bittman. Mr. Reinhart said Mr. Lahey’s genius was in incorporating and modernizing a few different old techniques known to bakers, but that “the real breakthrough was when Bittman called it ‘no-knead.’”
Mr. Lahey agreed. “Mark gave it the no-knead name, ” he said. “I thought it was a mistake — it’s just ancient bread made before fears and electricity — but he’s the writer so we went with it.”
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The recipe proved not only popular, but hugely influential. Soon, home bakers and professionals began iterating on the process. Many were introduced to the concept of no-knead breads via a modified technique in Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François’s “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007). Chad Robertson’s “Tartine Bread” (Chronicle Books, 2010) took the concept, and moved it into the more-advanced world of sourdoughs.
“The biggest change no-knead bread made is that home bakers now had a good idea of what they were doing and a familiarity with the basics of artisan bread baking, ” Mr. Forkish said.
This allowed Mr. Forkish to introduce more complicated techniques in his “Flour Water Salt Yeast” (Ten Speed Press, 2012), confident that home bakers would have the skills to follow along.
No Knead Bread
Flour is made up largely of starch molecules, along with protein (typically around 11 percent to 13 percent by weight). Two of these classes of proteins, glutenins and gliadins, can cross-link in the presence of water, forming molecular bonds and creating gluten, the stretchy, sticky network that traps air bubbles produced by yeast and coagulates as it heats to give a finished loaf its structure and chew.
A touch of acid is added to the liquid, to improve dough strength.Credit... Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
Kneading encourages proteins to rub against one another and entangle. But there are other ways to achieve similar or better results. In 1974, Raymond Calvel, a professor at L’École Nationale Supérieure de Meunerie et des Industries Céréalières in Paris, developed a technique known as autolyse,
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In which flour and water are mixed together and allowed to rest for a minimum of 20 minutes before salt and yeast are incorporated. He found that this short rest, during which enzymes in the flour would start weakening protein bonds, greatly reduced the amount of kneading required, while creating a gluten network that was easier to stretch and shape.
I like to think of dough as haphazardly stuck-together Legos that we are trying to form into an organized city. Before we can start building, we must first break down those shapes into individual bricks. Autolyse is like leaving a dog or a toddler alone with the Legos: They do the work of breaking them down for you.
As the wet dough rests overnight at room temperature, the enzymes weaken protein bonds so greatly that the simple action of carbon dioxide bubbles moving and stretching through the dough is enough to form a rough gluten network. Then, all it takes is a few well-placed folds to create a ball of dough that is ready to bake into an airy, open loaf.
New York Times No Knead Bread Recipe
You’ll want to work quickly and carefully when handling the dough.Credit... Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
When shaping, you want a membrane that smoothly wraps around the dough.Credit... Ryan Liebe for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
“As a baker, it’s not labor or ingredients, but time that is the most valuable ingredient, ” Mr. Migoya said. Learning how time can do the work for you turned me from someone who baked perhaps one or two loaves a year into someone who throws together dough on a whim before bedtime several times a month.
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That said, I’ve always wanted to take a more organized look at the bread I was baking and to solve some of the issues that I — and other home bakers — have had in the past. Chief among these are the dough’s slackness and its propensity to spread into a pancake-like loaf, baking up flat and dense, if
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