Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Kneadlessly Simple Method: Nine Easy Steps to Great Bread
Chapter 2: Getting Started: Basic Know-How, Ingredients, and Troubleshooting
Chapter 3: Easiest Ever Yeast Breads
Easy White Bread Loaves
Crusty White Peasant-Style Pot Bread
All-Purpose Light Wheat Bread
Crusty Portuguese-American Yeasted Cornbread
Easy Oat Bread
Everyday Oatmeal Honey-Raisin Bread
Great Granola Breakfast Bread
English Muffin Loaves
Crusty Seeded Pale Ale Pot Boule
Easy Four-Grain Pot Boule
Hearty Caraway Beer Bread
Double Chocolate-Honey Bread
Simple Enriched White Rolls
Chapter 4: American Favorites
County Fair White Bread
Pull-Apart Butter-Top Rolls
Cinnamon Pinwheel Raisin Bread
San Francisco-Style Sourdough Bread
Easy Cultured "Sourdough"Starter (with Commercial Yeast)
Sonoma-Style Multigrain Crunch Bread
Crusty Yeasted Cornbread with Coarse Salt
Easy Buttermilk Pot Bread with Coarse Salt
Cheddar and Chiles Bread
Farmhouse Potato Bread with Dill and Chives
Anadama Bread
Cronshi's Challah
Easy Cinnamon Sticky Buns
Good and Easy Pecan Sticky Buns (or Saucy Maple-Butter Sticky Buns)
Chapter 5: Old-World Classics
Pain Ordinaire (Everyday French Baguettes or Batards)
Fougasse (or Black Olive Fougasse)
Brioche
French Walnut Bread (Pain aux Noix)
Yeasted Pain d'Epice
Rosemary Focaccia with Coarse Salt
Ciabatta
Neapolitan-Style Pizza Dough
Tomato Sauce and Mozzarella Pizza
Herbed Cooked Tomato Pizza Sauce
Crispy Roasted Garlic and Parmesan Pot Bread
Rustic Cyprus-Style Herbed Olive Bread
Swedish Limpa Bread (Swedish Rye Bread with Caraway and Anise Seeds)
Scottish Oatmeal Bread
Chapter 6: Healthful, Whole-Grain, Multigrain, and Gluten-Free Breads
Crusty Seeded Cracked Wheat Pot Boule
100 Percent Whole Wheat-Honey Bread
Four Grain-Honey Bread
Rustic Rye Pot Bread
Raisin Pumpernickel
Super Seeded Almond Butter Health Bread
Crunchy-Munchy Pumpkin, Sunflower, and Flax Seed Boule
Hearty Multigrain Boule with Molasses
Brown and Wild Rice Crunch Bread
Gluten-Free Light Sandwich Bread
Gluten-Free Faux Rye Bread
Chapter 7: Sweet Breads and Gift Breads
Mardi Gras King's Cake
Panettone
All-Purpose Enriched Sweet Dough
Simple Streusel Coffeecake
Cornish Saffron Bread
Spiced Cranberry Bundt-Style Coffeecake
Holiday Cranberry-Apple Coffee Ring
Apple-Cream Cheese Pinwheel Pastries
Yeasted Banana Bundt-Style Coffee Ring
Cherry and Chocolate Coffee Ring with Kirsch
Chocolate—Chocolate Chip Bread Kit: Mix Recipe
Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Bread Recipe (Using Mix)
Going with the Grain Bread Kit Mix Recipe
Going with the Grain Bread Recipe (Using Mix)
Chapter 8: Toppings, Sauces, Glazes, Drizzles, and Finishing Touches
Cornstarch Glaze
Transparent Powdered Sugar Glaze
Powdered Sugar-Lemon Drizzle
Glossy Chocolate Drizzle
Chocolate Ganache Glaze
Caramel Sticky Bun Sauce
Maple-Butter Sticky Bun Sauce
Make-Ahead Streusel
Chapter 9: Kneadlessly Simple Recipe Makeover Guide: How to Convert Traditional Yeast Recipes to the KS Method
kneadlessly simple
Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads
Nancy Baggett
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Baggett. All rights reserved.
Photography copyright © 2009 by Alexandra Grablewski. All rights reserved.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baggett, Nancy, 1943-
Kneadlessly simple: fabulous, fuss-free, no-knead breads / Nancy Baggett.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978–0–470–39986–6 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Bread. I. Title.
TX769.B1745 2009
641.8’15—dc22
2008036192
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Book design and typography by Ralph Fowler / rlfdesign
Acknowledgments
Many people played a part in making this book a reality. I'm grateful to every one of them.
First, a big thank-you to Justin Schwartz, my editor, and the whole Wiley team, for enthusiastically supporting this project and working diligently to ensure that it moved along smoothly and efficiently. I also greatly appreciate the efforts of publicist Gypsy Lovett, book designer Ralph Fowler, and cover designer Jeff Faust. And I'm grateful to photographer Alexandra Grablewski and food stylist Brian Preston-Campbell, who created the enticing images for the book.
Thanks also
to Judith Riven, my agent, for her enthusiasm, very professional representation, and wise counsel along the way.
Many thanks to my recipe testers: My kitchen assistants Linda Kirschner and Judy Silver Weisberg helped test so many hundreds of recipes they probably dreamed about bread at night. Connie Hay also spent a number of days in my kitchen deep in dough! Home testers Sally Churgai, Erica Horting, and Dollene Targen provided valuable insights on what techniques and tips work best for the home baker and on how to make the recipes as clear and reliable as possible.
Another thank-you goes to Joe Yonan and Bonnie Benwick of the Washington Post Food Section, and to the staff at Eating Well, whose keen interest in my work on accessible no-knead bread recipes helped spawn the idea for this book.
Finally, thanks to the dozens of fine professionals whose expertise in all aspects of bread baking underpins the Kneadlessly Simple approach. It seems ironic that making things simple involved so much background research, but I needed to understand the chemistry and myriad practical applications of yeast baking to simplify and streamline without negatively affecting bread quality.
I am particularly indebted to gifted baker and teacher Nick Malgieri for offering some valuable suggestions for improving my manuscript. Another thank-you goes to Dr. R. Carl Hoseney for helping me understand some of the complicated chemical processes that occur during yeast baking. Here, in alphabetical order, are the other experts whose observations, theories, methods, tips, treatises, experiments, and bits of wisdom have expanded my knowledge and influenced my thinking, recipes, and method. Some of these folks I know well, others a little, others only from their work: Rose Levy Berenbaum, Emily Buelher, Bernard Clayton, Raymond Cavel, Shirley Corriher, Elizabeth David, Rosada Didier, Carol Field, Maggie Gleser, Philippe Gosselin, George Greenstein, Jeffrey Hamelman, Jim Lahey, Daniel Leader, Joe Ortiz, Beatrice Ojakangas, Craig Ponsford, Peter Reinhart, Nancy Silverton, Monica Spiller, and Daniel Wing. Besides these individuals, I must thank the dedicated people behind two wonderful Web sites, thefreshloaf.com and theartisan.net, who provide a wealth of accurate, completely free information on a whole array of yeast baking topics.
Introduction
I've loved making homemade yeast bread since my mother first let me "help" prepare her cinnamon buns when I was five. I was lulled by the peaceful, calming nature of the process and amazed and proud of what wondrously good food—fresh, warm, irresistible bread—we could create from such ordinary kitchen supplies. Until I was a teenager, my mother was a stay-at-home mom, so she gave me the gift of many leisurely hours of baking by her side. My memories of those quiet times in our farmhouse kitchen are still vivid.
Once I was grown and had my own home, I carried on my mother's baking traditions, loving the feeling of tranquility and connectedness with my past, and the extraordinary sensory experience and satisfaction of serving my family bread that came straight from our oven. Ironically, after I started writing food articles and cookbooks and honed my baking skills in professional pastry school, it was harder and harder to find the stretches of personal time my mother's old-fashioned yeast recipes required—even though I was usually working in my own kitchen! I realized that for people who spent most of their waking hours away from home, it was much more difficult to squeeze yeast baking into their lives.
Convinced that those who couldn't enjoy baking their own bread were missing out, I began experimenting with the new fast-rising yeasts that were introduced to the market in the 1980s. These launched with the claim that they needed no proofing, and that breads could now be turned out in half the usual time. By accelerating the process with lots of yeast and fast, warm rises, I found that it was indeed possible to have homemade yeast bread on the table in less than two hours—I even created a book full of recipes to prove it! But, sad to say, the hurried rises yielded loaves that were more fluff than flavor, and the off-putting muss and fuss of bread baking still remained.
For nearly two decades I set aside my yearning to make yeast baking more accessible to busy home cooks, spending most of the interim producing stories and recipes on other baking and sweets topics, as well as writing several well-received cookbooks on cookies, chocolate, and, most recently, American desserts. Like so many other people who have to snatch a few minutes here and there for bread baking, I gravitated more and more to quick breads. Yeast baking didn't seem to fit the increasingly hectic pace of life.
Then, early in 2006, the editors at Eating Well asked me to create a yeast bread to go with a soup story. They wanted it easy as well as healthful, they said, because their readers were usually pressed for time. They, their readership, and I were all very pleased with my streamlined, no-knead recipe, although it was completely counter to a growing trend toward more complicated, multi-step artisan-style loaves.
Since the late 1980s, a passionate group of professional artisan bakers and earnest hobbyists had been switching away from the typical American "direct method" formulas (mixing commercial yeast, water, and all the flour together and letting the dough rise) to long, slow rises and more complex and time-consuming sponge and sourdough techniques popular in Europe. (Actually, these methods were also widely used in America until the twentieth century: Nineteenth-century cookbook authors routinely directed their readers to "set a sponge," the day before they made bread. And so many prospectors during the California Gold Rush baked sourdough bread that they came to be called "sourdoughs" themselves.)
As a result of the artisan movement, the quality of bread in this country was getting better and better. But it bothered me that the recipes being published almost invariably demanded multiple days and mixtures and effectively shut out all but the most dedicated home hobbyists from America's bread revolution.
I began thinking about some of the techniques the artisan bakers had newly introduced or rediscovered these past decades, with an eye toward simplifications that would make them more accessible to the legions of busy and inexperienced home cooks. Baker Jim Lahey's clever no-knead, slow-rise French bread recipe in an October 2006 New York Times article by Mark Bittman definitely headed in that direction. It reminded me of a minimal-knead, refrigerator-rise technique that I (and others) had experimented with in the early 1980s, but Lahey's approach was better: It included a much longer countertop rise, which encouraged fuller gluten and flavor development. For his crusty bread he also revived—with fantastic results!—the old custom of baking in a covered Dutch oven, a technique commonplace when most Americans had to cook at a fireplace or campfire, but largely forgotten (except by die-hard campers) today.
I wanted to see if all kinds of quality breads—from the currently popular crusty boules and focaccias to the soft, comfy home-style loaves of my childhood and everything in between—could be adapted to an even less demanding and more flexible no-knead, slow-rise approach. I also wanted to eliminate or minimize hand shaping. This often intimidates the inexperienced baker, plus it involves time, kitchen mess, and cleanup that discourage the busy cook. And I wanted to incorporate a recently developed yeast-retarding, cold-rise technique that arguably delivers the absolute best bread flavor. Finally, I aimed for a process so flexible that those who have to be away from the house for long periods can adjust the timing of all the usual yeast bread stages—mixing and first rise; second rise and shaping; and baking—to fit neatly into their own schedules.
The results of my initial experimentation led to a story and recipes that appeared in the Washington Post in the fall of 2007. Almost immediately, readers blitzed the Post food section staff and me personally with enthusiastic feedback. The story generated lots of Internet buzz, too. Even more amazing than the sheer number of e-mails I received was the wide variety of people who wrote them: novices who had been afraid to try yeast bread before; veteran bakers who liked my easier, fuss-free approach; and time-pressed cooks excited that they could finally fit yeast baking into their schedules again. I even received several e-mails containing traditional recipes, with fervent requests for advice on how to convert the
m to my no-knead method. (These requests led to the last chapter in this book—Chapter 8, the Kneadlessly Simple Recipe Makeover Guide.)
The enormous positive reaction proved not only the obvious—that people love, love, love good, fresh-from-the-oven yeast bread—but that when provided with a method that truly is simple and convenient, they are eager to join America's bread revolution. Which brings me to Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads. As the title indicates, the recipes require no kneading at all! Nor do I merely dodge kneading by manipulating the dough in a mixer or food processor: It actually kneads itself during a long, slow, cool rise.
I'm excited to say that my Kneadlessly Simple recipes eliminate all the obstacles that used to deter folks from enjoying one of life's ultimate pleasures, breathtakingly fresh, wholesome home-baked bread. Anyone—absolutely anyone—can make all sorts of flavorful, fine-textured yeast breads easily, economically, conveniently, without fancy equipment, and, so long as the date on yeast packet indicates it's fresh, very reliably. If you can stir, measure, and read, you can make these breads! Best of all, unlike some of the baked goods produced using shortcut methods of the past, these will routinely have superior texture, aroma, and taste. In fact, unless you are lucky enough to have a world-class bakery right down the street, these may be the best breads you have ever eaten. (And they will certainly be more affordable.)
A Word of Thanks to America's Artisan Bakers
I owe a debt of gratitude to America's artisan bakers: They paved the way and contributed greatly to the knowledge base underpinning the Kneadlessly Simple method. Thanks to them, it's an exciting time to be eating—and making—bread in this country. From the late 1980s on, ground-breaking professional bakers like Craig Ponsford and other members of the Bread Bakers Guild of America have been dedicated to exploring and spreading the word on how to bake the best-tasting, best-quality, most interesting breads. These individuals have so raised the level of American baking that the United States now competes successfully in the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie, the world cup of baking: American teams overtook the previously dominant French to win gold medals in 1999 and 2005 and a silver medal in 2002.
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