Half Baked

Bread baking is not to be entered into lightly. To become even a halfway decent baker of bread takes more than a little dedication, but it’s an endeavor worth pursuing. Without a doubt, a loaf of homemade bread is far superior to anything you can find in the grocery store, even the fancy loaves that looked like they popped out of the oven earlier that morning.

When baking bread at home there are too many factors beyond my control – the humidity outside and the room temperature, for instance – that can work against me. In other words, a bread recipe that may work for me on a sunny day in the fall may fail miserably on a wet spring day. And honestly, making bread can be physical chore. It makes it pretty tempting to lean on fail-proof recipes, but most recipes that claim to be “simple” just don’t produce bread with much appeal. Sure, technically it's bread, but then again, technically Jim Carrey is a comedian.

So a few years ago when Mark Bittman wrote about Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread-making method in the New York Times, carb hounds rejoiced. Not only could we produce a beautiful loaf that rivaled any artisan bread, but we could do it without the labor of kneading and babysitting a lump of dough through its various life stages.

Now Lahey has written his own book, aptly named, My Bread (and it’s a good thing he’s taking credit for the technique; if you Google “Mark Bittman no-knead bread” 1.2 million listings come up!). His cookbook goes beyond his basic bread recipe to include some pretty amazing breads. Read it from the beginning and learn how Lahey fell in love with baking (who brings a homemade loaf of bread on a first date as a gift?) and you’ll also see his years of dedication to his art.

The 220-page book is well written and engaging, and many recipes include step-by-step photography to illustrate. The photos of the finished bread are beautiful, dark and moody and raise bread to the level of art.

But does the no-knead recipe work? When Bittman first published the basic no-knead recipe my sister and her husband Louis set out to master it. (Trust me, those two, especially Louis, do nothing half-heartedly!). Soon after its publication, Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen took up the challenge to improve on this basic recipe by producing their own no-knead (well, almost no-knead) bread, which is the one I started baking for myself. Louis and I put our respective breads to the test last Thanksgiving when they hosted dinner for 35 people. It may have been the fact that 30 of the people at dinner were Louis’ relatives, or it may have been the arm-twisting Louis did, but his bread – Lahey’s bread – won. (As far as I’m concerned, this just proves that blood is thicker than bread.)

When I got my hands on My Bread I decided to tackle the basic bread recipe, but my first loaf, while pretty, was flat. Too little water and not enough stickiness, I decided. Second try produced similar results: pretty to look at but a dense loaf. I gave it one more shot, adding more water than called for and got the loaf I was looking for.

The moral? Don’t confuse “no-knead” with “simple.” Good bread requires dedication and skill. Lahey’s book is a great teaching tool, but give yourself the chance to fail and learn from your mistakes.

And maybe by Thanksgiving you can put your brother-in-law’s bread to shame. Now that’s something to be grateful for.

My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method
By Jim Lahey with Rick Flaste
(W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2009)