I make bread by hand (using conventional recipes and methods) at least once a week and I’m usually pretty pleased with the results - today I made an 60/20/20 white/wholemeal/oat flour loaf with seeds and grains - and it’s light, fluffy and delicious.
I keep stumbling across recipes for ‘no-knead artisan bread’ on various foodie sites. I’ve tried quite a few of these and although they do rise well and produce a crumb with impressive-looking rustic bubbles, I have found that without exception, the bread is not really very pleasant to eat.
I find it rubbery (I guess that’s attributable to the higher water content in the recipe), but they’re also bland, or worse, often a little bitter or acrid. It’s the same sort of unsatisfying taste that happens if you accidentally omit the salt from ordinary bread.
Anyone else noticed this? Are these recipes popular just because they’re easy, or am I doing something wrong every time?
Yes, no-knead bread as given, is a little on the bland side, but still quite good. Not sure what you mean by “rubbery.” I find the crumb to be nice and similar to anything I’d buy from an artisanal baker, although the bread stales very quickly. I use a sour dough yeast for mine, so I don’t have the flavor problem. You could also try letting it rise for a longer time (like over 2-3 days) in the fridge to help develop flavor. But the Cook’s Illustrated adjustments work pretty well.
I just made it with 1/2 C sourdough starter instead of yeast and it was very good. But then I like the original recipe (though it isn’t something I’d want to eat every day).
I mean rubbery as if the bread is made from little bubbles of cooked pasta. I mean, not really as rubbery as that, but an effect reminiscent of that.
I may try it with a sourdough starter - I don’t have one on the go at the moment, but the wild yeasts in my locality can be quite interesting - I captured some a couple of weeks ago and it made a really quite stinky, cheesy culture which was quite unpleasant while proving (but the cooked bread was delicious)
Not sure I understand that description. The bread has a pasta-like texture? I get a normal bread texture. Are you perhaps undercooking it?
I’ve mentioned this before on the boards, but most of the wild yeasts you “capture” using the flour+water “from scratch” method are in the flour itself. You’re getting very little, if any, local influence. If you want to be sure you only get local yeasts, you can nuke your flour and kill anything living on it.
Anyhow, I find it better to get an established culture with a known provenance and work from that. I’ve never been happy with the sourness or leavening power of the “home-captured” kind.
I use the Cook’s Illustrated recipe as well, with a few minor changes: double the vinegar* and I keep the total moisture content the same but with more beer (less water). Good stuff! If you’re making it to go with stew or thick soups, put it into the dutch oven in two balls instead of one, and you get a pair of really good bread bowls this way.
Also, once I made it with chocolate chips in the dough, which was Teh Awesome. No reason OP can’t mix in some seeds and grains.
Their assertion that any vinegar besides plain white is utter crap. I’ve made it with cider, malt and other vinegars.
That’s bizarre. And disgusting. I make Mark Bittman’s original no-knead* bread all the time and I’ve never experienced anything remotely like that, not even when I fiddle with whole wheat, oat, or buckwheat flours. It doesn’t generally form large bubbles - overall its quite dense. That’s good for me because I hate large bubbles in bread, and prefer it dense. While dense, it isn’t blobby and chewy like you’re describing though.
Of course its a bit bland, it only has 4 ingredients. Personally I love the taste of “just plain bread” but WTF do you expect from something that takes 30 minutes and costs 40 cents?? I often add herbs and/or shredded cheese for flavor – its an incredibly forgiving and sturdy recipe.
*simpler than later incarnations you find on the internet, as featured in “The Minimalist Cooks Dinner” which includes only flour, water, instant yeast and salt with a 1/2 hour rise.
With the no-knead recipes I’ve made (using the stretch and fold method) I always do an overnight proof; sometimes an overnight proof and then a stint in the fridge. Bland bread is usually the result of rapid rising which doesn’t allow the fermentation process to bring out the flavour of the wheat in the flour.
And no-knead with a short proving period doesn’t allow the gluten in the flour to develop, which might explain the texture you don’t like.
Maybe try a recipe, cut the yeast amount down to a half or even a quarter and give it an overnight rise in a cool place. See if that produces a more interesting flavour and appealing texture.
I make no-knead bread a lot and I’ve never found it bland. To me, it has a rich and buttery crumb – there’s no need to use butter on it!
What I do: I never, ever use the dough straight off. I let it rise on the kitchen counter, then I refrigerate it for several hours. Then I slice off a chunk and make a loaf.
The longer you let the dough sit around, the more complex it becomes. I once made a double batch, and by the time I got toward the end it had turned into sourdough. When that batch was finished, I didn’t rinse out the bowl – I just plopped the next batch of dough into it. The new dough picked up both the complexity and sour-ness of the previous loaf.
I’ve never tried the Cook’s Illustrated version, but seeing from what everyone’s been saying, I just might have to
There was a great recipe in Mother Earth News a couple of years ago, for a no knead bread made in a batch big enough for several loaves. The idea was to bake one loaf the day after making the dough, and then one every day or two over the next week or two. That authors readily admitted that the first loaf wouldn’t taste as good as the last loaf. So maybe what you need is simply more time.
I can’t find the recipe at the moment, as it’s still in a moving box somewhere, but it might be available in their online archives.
That’s the premise behind the recipes in Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I love the book, and here’s their basic recipe! It makes really yummy bread. I don’t bake it on a pizza stone with the steam, I bake it in my Dutch oven instead.
I’d check what water you’re using, too. Different waters can have chlorine, minerals, all kinds of wackiness. Get some filtered as part of your problem-solving process. Good luck!
Holy hell, Hello Again. Thirty minutes? Total? The Cook’s Illstrd version calls for an 8- to 18-hour rise time, and another two hours after you lightly knead it 10 times. (I always do the longest rise time. Start bread one evening, bake it the next afternoon.)
Hmm…that name looks very familiar. And the publication date isn’t too far off, either. I wonder if the book was excerpted or the author wrote the piece in Mother Earth News around the same time!
I would guess that he meant 30 minutes of work total. That’s the way I look at it anyway, a few minutes of work for me today and anytime next week that I want bread I have to do a few more minutes of work.
No, technically its 60 minutes total – 30 minutes to mix & rise, 30 minutes to bake. Sixty Minute Bread from “The Minimalist Cooks Dinner” by Mark Bittman
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons “Instant” yeast (NOT active, not rapid-rise – instant or “bread machine” yeast)(SAF brand recommended)
2 teaspoons salt.
(optional: tsp of black pepper, dill, oregano, or dried herb of choice)
Combine flour, yeast and salt in a bowl. Add 1 & 1/4 cups warm water all at once stirring with spoon and mushing with your hands to incorporate as needed. Add additional water by the Tablespoon, if needed, until a ball forms.
Shape the dough into a round by turning the ends under (recipe says you can also form into a long loaf, but this never works for me), using only enough flour to allow you to handle the dough. Place dough on a cookie sheet.
Let rise in the warmest spot in your kitchen while you preheat the oven to 425F.
Bake 30-45 minutes, until crust is golden-brown, crisp & firm. Allow to cool most of the way before slicing (if you can wait…).
Butter. Nom.
Because it contains no fat, this bread does not keep more than a day well sealed. Not to worry. 2-4 people can devour it at a sitting.
May substitute 1 cup of whole wheat flour. If so, rise an hour if possible.
