No knead photos

This morning I tried one of the most controversial recipes in the world of artisan baking: The No Knead bread.

This recipe has polarized bread makers since Jim Lahey of Co. Pizza made the recipe famous in 2006 through a feature in the New York Times.  

This bread caused a furor among white thumbs and some even went as far as hitting each other with bread sticks and flattening each other’s noses with rolling pins. It was ugly.

Even the band Bread couldn’t accept the fact that they weren’t kneaded anymore. In fact, sales of their Anthology Greatest Hits that features an extended killer–suicide– version of their overtly depressing song IF, have been reportedly on the decline.

“I don’t knead Bread,” said one of the former fans of the band headed by David Gates.

Some 10,000 “kneaders” in top bakeries have been laid off due to this revolutionary recipe.

“For ages, kneading is as essential as flour in making bread,” complained one ex-kneader.” Now, we’re all unemployed.”

I agree. After trying a couple of traditional breads, this one is really something new.

Obviously, No Knead Bread doesn’t need a lot of things that normal bread does.

Aside from not working on the dough, there’s no need for a bread starter. 

With breads like traditional baguettes, a bread starter made up of a cup of flour, some yeast, and water and fermented overnight is required for that fermented taste in artisanal bread. This starter will later be mixed with the actual baguette dough.

With the No Knead Bread, the whole dough is the starter. Once combined–the flour, salt, yeast and specific amount of water, it is left to ferment for as long as 24 hours.

There is also no need for a steam oven to develop crust. The oven within an oven baking technique does that.

Once this dough doubles in size and bubbles up like a living, breathing goo of microorganisms, it is ready. Shape it into a ball, plop it into a heated Dutch oven and stuff it inside a 450-degree oven. After that, magic. Crusty and chewy bread emerges from the flames. Amazing!

Now, the recipe stated that this No Knead Dough could be used for pizza crusts, baguettes, rolls etc. Just follow the instructions in making the dough mixture and then shape the proofed dough into your desired output.

I am making another batch of this dough for Saturday and I am intending to use it for homemade hamburgers. God knows how much I miss burgers. Yes that one, I still need.

I am also making more mini baguettes for an attempt to make my own Vietnamese Banh Mi. 

Like the burgers, the Banh Mi will be made from scratch– even the mayonnaise, liver pate, pickled carrots and Daikon radish, and the meat filing, which I plan to be braised pork belly in caramel sauce.

From dough to bread

If Wonder Bread and other ready-made bread companies spend billions of dollars in advertising, then they should allot several millions to advertise exclusively to me because the gap between their products and my wallet is expanding like the universe.

Yes, they totally lost my business now and only some real ‘dough’ can make me go back to their forever-fresh-chemically–enriched bread products.

Thanks to the Internet, I now know how to make my own bread.

Making bread is a joy. The process is laborious and, like life, unfair. I say unfair because the amount of time and work needed to make bread does not equal the actual lifespan of the bread itself. After taking the bread out of the hot oven, it barely experiences the thrill of being. It doesn’t even have time to cool. Instead, it gets ripped, dunked in sauce, slathered with butter, stuffed in mouth, chewed, swallowed, and digested. A goner.

Almost 24 hours working on bread that will only exist for three minutes.

Unfair, but nevertheless, beautiful.

I am addicted to bread making, I must confess.

When I knead my dough with pure tenderness, I sometimes see Sheryl Mae looking intently at me, perhaps wishing that I were kneading her aching back instead of the glutinous mass.

I ceased to care about other things rising as long as my dough rises well.

I proof my dough better than I can ever prove a triangle.

So what have I learned so far? So far, in my quest to make my own bread and bolt out of the industrial supply of bread that never dies, I learned to make baguettes, French rolls, Ciabatta, cinnamon raisin oat bread, croissant, chocolate rolls, and pastry bread. I am yet to try my own pizza dough using the infamous ‘no-knead’ bread.

I look at bread differently now. It makes sense that in Turkey, bread is considered holy. In Turkey, you can throw your spouse on the street, but never left over bread– not even a crumb.

likewise, anything can be dirty, but bread. So if you accidentally drop a piece of bread on the pavement, you can come back the next day for it and it will still be clean. You even can soak it in grime and paint and it will still be clean.

I think we should view bread in the same way, or for that matter, all forms of food–well, except perhaps, anything that resembles chicken nuggets and bread that has eternal shelf life.