3 min read

My first no-knead bread bake

A couple days ago, I saw that friends were all trying out the New York Times' no knead bread recipe and I've been meaning to for years, so I checked our cupboards and lo and behold we had a new bag of bread flour and some live yeast in the fridge (my spouse bakes regularly) so I finally gave it a try. Here's a quick GIF recap of the whole process which took about 18hrs total, even though there is maybe ten minutes of actual work spread across two days.

There are only four steps in the recipe so I figured I'd use Instagram Stories to compress all the time waiting into a string of short videos. Some notes from baking my first ever loaf of bread:

  • I started around noon on Tuesday, mixed the ingredients, then let them rest until the next morning around 7AM.
  • I was eating bread by 11AM.
  • It feels like cheating, since there's almost no work to it. The crust came out incredible and crunchy and it was no work, just a lot of waiting to produce it.
  • We happened to have a new bag of baking flour (I know a lot of stores are currently out and that's a bummer) and already had live yeast in a jar in the fridge, which made it easy. Having good ingredients helps.
  • I will never use cotton dish towels as the recipe suggests because they were a horror show afterwards and I've been soaking them for a day to clean. I'm gonna use parchment paper next time.
  • The final lid-off baking to brown the top was maybe ended 5min too early. I stopped around 15min on the final step and I should have gone 20 or 25 to let the inside bake fully.
  • I can't wait to try this again and everyone has already pointed out the Tartine country bread recipe as being superior, so I might try that one next.
  • I still dislike Instagram Stories. I had to use an outside website to fetch my own .mp4 files then convert to animated GIFs to save them here.
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