The Famous Jim Lahey/Sullivan Street Bakery/Mark Bittman/New York Times No-Knead Bread

In November 2006 Mark Bittman created something of a sensation among bakers (who have grown like yeast in the blogosphere - have a look at The Fresh Loaf for instance) by publishing a story and accompanying recipe about a remarkable sort of bread.

Bittman, may I note in passing, writes the best newspaper food column "(The Minimalist)" I know, along with a related blog "(Bitten)" and all the food news that's fit to print - in the New York Times of course. My only hesitation in mentioning it is that any reader who wanders there is never likely to come back to The Ful Blog, but never mind...

The short version is this: mix three cups of flour with half as much warm water and 1/4 of a teaspoon (sic) of yeast. Leave it for 18 hours (no I didn't say anything about kneading). Turn it out and fold it twice, then leave it for two more hours. Bake it inside a hot crock in a very hot oven for half an hour and a bit.

That would probably suffice, but use the more detailed version found here. The result is, I will say with reasonable confidence, the best bread you've ever made (unless you're one of the over-achievers over at The Fresh Loaf) and among the best you've eaten. It has a remarkably crisp and crunchy crust (not to mention the alliteration...), a 'crumb' (ha - see, I've been hanging out with the Fresh Loaf guys) with that open texture and slightly elastic feel that you, fellow Melburnians, pay startling amounts for from Philippa's or Dench's, and a great developed flavour too.

The bread recipe came from baker Jim Lahey at New York's Sullivan Street Bakery. The original story (here) is worth a read. The short version (again) is that a wet dough and long fermentation do the work of kneading and provide flavour. The cooking method ensures the crust by keeping moisture in the crock. We use a pyrex dish with a lid.

Since then Bittman has published a faster version (here). We've made it, and enjoyed it. The crumb (...) was a little less elastic, tending towards a cake-y (but agreeable) texture. I was a little surprised to see the comments in that article about flours and grains, since we had already been experimenting pretty liberally with variations on the content of the original recipe.

In particular we tend to bake with spelt (see this entry for more). Our No Knead bread has tended, like the one pictured here, to be whole grain spelt with a small amount - 1/2 cup - of rye. We don't think it performs quite as well as regular white bread flour in terms of crumb (there I go again!), but the flavour is wonderful. The colour is an almost pink-ish brown.

If I could call foodie science geek Harold McGee to talk about the physics and chemistry of our experience (see the original Bittman article for this) I would be interested to know more about why it doesn't rise as much. My reading suggests that spelt has quite a bit of gluten, but that it is chemically different and can easily be over-kneaded. Perhaps, if the 18 hour wait replaced the kneading, we ought to proceed more quickly with the spelt bread than the original recipe does? We'll see.

One other kind of variation I should share is our tendency to produce seasonal or festive breads. We have very successfully made Fig & Fennel bread (add 1/4 cup chopped dried figs and a teaspoon of fennel seed, crushed, at the first stage), Cranberry-Cardamon (1/4 cup of dried cranberries, or 'Craisins', and the seeds of four or five cardamom pods, crushed) and others for particular purposes. These extraneous additions won't make our bread rise any higher either, but they're fun. So there.