Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery. David Winer increased the amounts, and simplified the procedure somewhat.
·
4 cups all-purpose or
bread flour, more for dusting
·
¼ teaspoon, slightly
heaping, of instant yeast
·
1 plus a heaping ½
teaspoons salt
·
2 cups plus 3 ounces of
water
1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add
water, and stir until blended; dough will be very sticky. Scrape down dough
with a rubber spatula and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest and
rise, about 18 to 20 hours, at warm room temperature.
2. Dough is ready when risen about double and its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and scrape dough onto it; sprinkling the dough with more flour, fold it over on itself once or twice into a ball shape—a flour-dusted pastry scraper helps. On counter, dust again and cover dough loosely with plastic wrap or parchment paper and let rise for about 2 hours (important step).
4. When ready to
bake, generously flour your hands and the dough. Use a floured pastry scraper
to form a ball while generously re-dusting the dough to manage stickiness. Carefully slide
the rack with pot out from oven and set the lid aside. Slip your floured hands
and pastry scraper under the dough and gently transfer it into the pot. Should dough be unevenly distributed, shake
pot vigorously to smooth it out. Cover dough with lid and bake 70 minutes. The bread should be beautifully browned and
210o F in the center. Cool on a rack before cutting.
The Minimalist
The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work
By MARK BITTMAN
Published: November 8, 2006
INNOVATIONS in
bread baking are rare. In fact, the 6,000-year-old process hasn’t changed much
since Pasteur made the commercial production of standardized yeast possible in
1859. The introduction of the gas stove, the electric mixer and the food
processor made the process easier, faster and more reliable. I’m not counting sliced bread as a positive step, but Jim Lahey’s method may be the greatest thing since.
This story began in late September when Mr. Lahey sent an e-mail message inviting me to attend a session of a class he was giving at Sullivan Street Bakery, which he owns, at 533 West 47th Street in Manhattan. His wording was irresistible: “I’ll be teaching a truly minimalist breadmaking technique that allows people to make excellent bread at home with very little effort. The method is surprisingly simple — I think a 4-year-old could master it — and the results are fantastic.”
I set up a time to visit Mr. Lahey, and we baked together, and the only bad news is that you cannot put your 4-year-old to work producing bread for you. The method is complicated enough that you would need a very ambitious 8-year-old. But the results are indeed fantastic.
Mr. Lahey’s method is striking on several levels. It requires no kneading. (Repeat: none.) It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. It takes very little effort.
It accomplishes all of this by combining a number of unusual though not unheard of features. Most notable is that you’ll need about 24 hours to create a loaf; time does almost all the work. Mr. Lahey’s dough uses very little yeast, a quarter teaspoon (you almost never see a recipe with less than a teaspoon), and he compensates for this tiny amount by fermenting the dough very slowly. He mixes a very wet dough, about 42 percent water, which is at the extreme high end of the range that professional bakers use to create crisp crust and large, well-structured crumb, both of which are evident in this loaf.
The dough is so sticky that you couldn’t knead it if you wanted to. It is mixed in less than a minute, then sits in a covered bowl, undisturbed, for about 18 hours. It is then turned out onto a board for 15 minutes, quickly shaped (I mean in 30 seconds), and allowed to rise again, for a couple of hours. Then it’s baked. That’s it.
I asked Harold McGee, who is an amateur breadmaker and best known as the author of “On Food and Cooking” (Scribner, 2004), what he thought of this method. His response: “It makes sense. The long, slow rise does over hours what intensive kneading does in minutes: it brings the gluten molecules into side-by-side alignment to maximize their opportunity to bind to each other and produce a strong, elastic network. The wetness of the dough is an important piece of this because the gluten molecules are more mobile in a high proportion of water, and so can move into alignment easier and faster than if the dough were stiff.”
That’s as technical an explanation as I care to have, enough to validate what I already knew: Mr. Lahey’s method is creative and smart.
But until this point, it’s not revolutionary. Mr. McGee said he had been kneading less and less as the years have gone by, relying on time to do the work for him. Charles Van Over, author of the authoritative book on food-processor dough making, “The Best Bread Ever” (Broadway, 1997), long ago taught me to make a very wet dough (the food processor is great at this) and let it rise slowly. And, as Mr. Lahey himself notes, “The Egyptians mixed their batches of dough with a hoe.”
What makes Mr. Lahey’s process revolutionary is the resulting combination of great crumb, lightness, incredible flavor — long fermentation gives you that — and an enviable, crackling crust, the feature of bread that most frequently separates the amateurs from the pros. My bread has often had thick, hard crusts, not at all bad, but not the kind that shatter when you bite into them. Producing those has been a bane of the amateur for years, because it requires getting moisture onto the bread as the crust develops.
To get that kind of a crust,
professionals use steam-injected ovens. At home I have tried brushing the dough
with water (a hassle and ineffective); spraying it (almost as ineffective and
requiring frequent attention); throwing ice cubes on the floor of the oven (not
good for the oven, and not far from ineffective); and filling a pot with stones
and preheating it, then pouring boiling water over the stones to create a wet
sauna (quite effective but dangerous, physically challenging and
space-consuming). I was discouraged from using La Cloche, a covered stoneware
dish, by my long-standing disinclination to crowd my kitchen with inessential
items that accomplish only one chore. I was discouraged from buying a $5,000
steam-injected oven by its price.
The entire process is incredibly simple, and, in the three weeks I’ve been using it, absolutely reliable. Though professional bakers work with consistent flour, water, yeast and temperatures, and measure by weight, we amateurs have mostly inconsistent ingredients and measure by volume, which can make things unpredictable. Mr. Lahey thinks imprecision isn’t much of a handicap and, indeed, his method seems to iron out the wrinkles: “I encourage a somewhat careless approach,” he says, “and figure this may even be a disappointment to those who expect something more difficult. The proof is in the loaf.”
The loaf is incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule that is produced more easily than by any other technique I’ve used, and will blow your mind. (It may yet change the industry. Mr. Lahey is experimenting with using it on a large scale, but although it requires far less electricity than conventional baking, it takes a lot of space and time.) It is best made with bread flour, but all-purpose flour works fine. (I’ve played with whole-wheat and rye flours, too; the results are fantastic.)
You or your 8-year-old may hit this perfectly on the first try, or you may not. Judgment is involved; with practice you’ll get it right every time.
The baking itself is virtually foolproof, so the most important aspect is patience. Long, slow fermentation is critical. Mr. Lahey puts the time at 12 to 18 hours, but I have had much greater success at the longer time. If you are in a hurry, more yeast (three-eighths of a teaspoon) or a warmer room temperature may move things along, but really, once you’re waiting 12 hours why not wait 18? Similarly, Mr. Lahey’s second rising can take as little as an hour, but two hours, or even a little longer, works better.
Although even my “failed” loaves were as good as those from most bakeries, to make the loaf really sensational requires a bit of a commitment. But with just a little patience, you will be rewarded with the best no-work bread you have ever made. And that’s no small thing.
