No Work No Knead Bread Recipes

Steps:

• 1. Before you go to bed, stir together 1 cup flour, 1 cup water, and the packet of yeast in a large mixing bowl. Don't worry about lumps. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside. Let the yeast do its work while you sleep.
• 2. In the morning, stir in the remaining three cups flour, salt, olive oil, and the second cup of water. Try to get most of the lumps out. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside. Let it do its work while you do your morning activities. In a coupla-few hours, the dough swells to at least double its size. It may reach the plastic wrap. If it's a cool day, do this in the oven with the light on to make a warm place.
• 3. Remove the plastic wrap and "stir down" the dough. It will lose about half it's size. Flop the dough into a pan lined with parchment paper. (The loaf of bread in the picture was made in the kind of oval roaster one might use to cook fish, but I've used everything from bread pans to salad bowls. The most important thing is the parchment paper because the bread will stick like concrete to anything else.)
• 4. Let the dough grow again until it almost doubles. Do not cover it with plastic wrap as pulling off the wrap will make it collapse again.
• 5. When it has grown, preheat the oven to 440F and put a rack in the middle. When the oven is hot, put the pan of bread in the center of the oven and bake for 20 minutes.
• 6. After 20 minutes, lower the oven temperature to 350 degrees and continue to bake for an additional 40 minutes.
• 7. Remove from the oven and flop the bread out of the pan and paper. Optionally, put it back in the now turned off oven for a few minutes to crisp up the sides and bottom further. Cool set up on a rack or just balanced on the pan it cooked in as shown in the picture.

Steps:

• In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 1/2 cups/345 grams water and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.
• Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.
• Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.
• At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is OK. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.