Making bread - the easy way!

Easy recipe suitable for a daily fresh loaf

Older recipes here and here.

This is really easy - I make this bread every day (unless I wake up late, because you need one hour in the morning if you do the rising overnight)

Here is the original no-knead bread recipe that became very popular: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread

I follow that recipe roughly, although I don't use the "dutch oven" but instead a backing tray or roasting (see pictures below).

Here is what I do:

1. In a bowl, mix 500 g flour (about 3 cups) and 5 g of salt (a teaspoon) and make a little bowl in the middle of the flour
2. Pour 350 g of water (about 1.5 cups) in the bowl of the flour and add 0.5 teaspoons of yeast (about 2 g) (dried yeast, more depending on the temperature, goal is that it can rise overnight) and start stirring starting from the center of your bowl. You can also add just 1 cup of water for a more sturdy dough that becomes less flat when baking, but then you will need to knead the dough with your hands.
3. Mix the dough until there is no dry flour anymore
4. Cover with a a plate (or cellophane) overnight for about 10 hours until it has risen a lot in volume (a few hours more or less do not matter, it mostly matters whether it got significantly more volume)
5. Preheat your oven at 250 degrees C.
6. Prepare a deep backing tray or roasting pot (or the lid of it) with a bit of parchment paper. Drop in the dough and shove it in the oven. I usually spray some water with a spray bottle so that it becomes humid in the over for a little while. This creates a nicer crust but is not essential.
7. After 4-5 minutes, make a cut in the bread so that it has some space to open up. Then bake for another 20 minutes.
8. Done! take it out of the form and let it cool

It sounds like a lot of work, but when you have done it once it's quite easy. Check out the following table with the step and how little time it takes.

Step-by-step images