The bread I make badly, once a week
Four ingredients, no kneading, and a loaf that is somewhere between rustic and structurally concerning. I have made it about sixty times and it has been genuinely good perhaps eleven of those, which turns out to be enough.
I am not good at this. I want to be clear before anybody takes advice from it.
I have made this loaf about sixty times over two years and it has been genuinely good maybe eleven times, decent perhaps thirty, and the remainder have ranged from dense to a thing Tom described, once, as “more of a paving slab”.
It is still worth doing, because the median loaf is better than the bread we would otherwise buy, it costs about forty pence, and most of it gets eaten as toast, at seven in the morning.
The whole thing
Flour, water, salt, a quarter teaspoon of dried yeast. Mixed with a spoon, in the bowl, for about forty seconds. Covered and left on the side overnight.
In the morning it is bubbly and alive and slightly alarming. It gets tipped out, folded over on itself a few times — not kneaded, folded, four or five times — and left for another half hour while the oven and a heavy lidded pot get very hot. Then in, lid on, half an hour. Lid off, fifteen more.
That’s it. Two minutes of work on Friday, ten on Saturday, most of it waiting.
The three things that were wrong
Not enough time. The first winter I was giving it five or six hours because I was impatient, and getting something close and heavy. Eight to twelve is the range. Twelve is better than eight.
More yeast, to speed it up. I did this for a month. It rises faster, it tastes of yeast, and it collapses in the oven, which is a specific disappointment because you can see it happen.
Flour on my hands. This was the big one and I only worked it out by watching somebody else do it. The dough is wet and sticks to everything and my instinct was to add flour until it stopped, which was about two extra handfuls, and those two handfuls were the difference between a loaf and a brick.
Wet hands instead. Just wet them under the tap. The dough slides off wet hands and you have not changed the recipe.
The lid
Fifteen or so loaves in, somebody told me why the pot has to have a lid on, and it reorganised the whole thing in my head.
The lid keeps the steam in. Steam keeps the crust soft for the first half hour, so the loaf can carry on rising into it. Without a lid the crust sets early and the bread hits a ceiling — literally — and stops.
Any heavy casserole works. Ours is a cheap cast-iron thing that came from Tom’s mum’s shed and had a screw in it.
The children
They are allowed to fold it. They are not allowed to shape it.
We tried letting Nell shape it and produced something the shape of an ear, which baked into a large ear, and which she was thrilled with and which nobody could slice.
She does the tipping-out now and puts the lid on with oven gloves and Tom hovering, and that is her job and she takes it seriously.
Why not a bread machine
We borrowed one for a month.
It makes a fine loaf. It is completely reliable and it comes out at the same time every day and it has a hole in the bottom where the paddle was.
I didn’t want it, and it took me a while to work out why, and the reason is a bit embarrassing: the two minutes on Friday night is the part I like. Standing in the kitchen at ten past nine, mixing four things with a spoon, with the house quiet. The bread is downstream of that.
Things people email to ask
- Why is my homemade bread dense?
- Usually one of three things: not enough time, an oven that is not hot enough, or too much flour added while shaping. The first is the most common — a dough that has not risen long enough has no structure and bakes into something close and heavy. Mine improved permanently when I stopped adding flour to stop the dough sticking and just accepted wet hands.
- Do you need to knead no-knead bread?
- No, and that is the whole point of it. A long slow rise — eight to twelve hours on a worktop — develops the same structure that ten minutes of kneading would, because time and enzymes do the work instead of your arms. You mix it for about forty seconds, cover it, and leave it alone overnight.
- Why bake bread in a lidded pot?
- The lid traps steam, and steam is what lets a loaf keep expanding before the crust sets. Without it you get a crust that hardens early and a loaf that cannot rise into it, which was my problem for the first fifteen or so. Any heavy casserole with a lid works; it does not need to be an expensive one, it needs to be heavy and to go in a hot oven empty first.
- How do you fit bread-making around a working week?
- Attach it to a specific evening rather than to an intention. Ours is mixed on a Friday night in about two minutes and baked on a Saturday morning, and it survives because it is fixed to a day. The two times I tried to make it a weekday thing, the dough sat in the fridge until Thursday and was thrown away.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
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The year we all put in, and how badly I handled it
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
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It is not a good recipe. It is a repeatable one — four things we always have, one pan, and a texture that survives being reheated on a Tuesday by a man who is not paying attention.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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