I have a bit of an obsession with the whole no-knead bread phenomenon. Check out this link that gives links to my previous posts and to the original article. The idea of no-knead bread was brought to the forefront because of an article that Mark Bittman did in the New York Times. I had never really made bread before and that article made it seem really easy to make a delicious loaf of bread. The kind of loaf that you would easily pay upwards of $5 for at a bakery.
The problem with making no-knead bread is that there’s some planning involved. The dough has to rise for between 12 and 18 hours. Then you have to play with it a bit and let it rise another few hours… and then you bake it. I always find it challenging to time the loaf just right so that it’s not ready to go while I’m asleep or something. Bittman wrote a follow-up article where he refined the original technique developed by Jim Lahey so that the rising time would be reduced to a mere four hours which is MUCH more manageable. He also developed a recipe for a whole wheat loaf which wasn’t part of the original article. I decided to make both over the course of a few days.
The white loaf turned out great. Very similar to the original no-knead recipe but a lot easier to work with and faster! I made some really great breakfast sandwiches this bread… it totally has my heart.
The whole wheat loaf was another story. The recipe calls for whole wheat flour, rye flour and cornmeal. For some reason I couldn’t find rye flour in bulk in my local stores (and I couldn’t summon the energy to go to Bulk Barn) so I used oat flour instead since the recipe said you could sub in other whole grain flours. The results were…. BIZARRE. The bread was oddly tense. Had a weird fermented taste to it. ANNND the crust wasn’t crusty enough. I tried to make it work but ended up eating less than half the loaf.
So, is this new technique a good one? A resounding YES for the white loaf and a big fat NO for the whole wheat loaf! I’ll stick to my tried and true method for whole wheat no-knead bread.
Click on this link for the full recipes.
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