I don’t have the patience or the time to spend on traditional bread making, but I love homemade bread. I had a couple of ah-ha moments experimenting with bread this spring. Both of these have made bread-making super simple and quick.

1. No-knead bread – This bread has only about 15 minutes of active working time but does have a long overnight proof/ferment time. I make the dough in the morning and the next day – pop it in the oven. The trick here is the long overnight proofing time. Instead of kneading to get the gluten formation, time and water do the work for you. As a bonus, the bread ferments just a bit giving it a slight sourdough taste.

1. Bakers Percentages and Hydration – I started using bakers percentages for bread. It’s more accurate and is very easy to reproduce the loaf every single time I make it. Hydration refers to how much water to total flour volume in the recipe. For a no-knead rustic style bread – I want an 80% hydration dough. This is needed for the long proofing time and I want an airy crumb and crunchy crust. See below for a simple breakdown of hydration.

I also use All-Purpose flour. I’ve used bread flour and can’t tell the difference in this particular bread. AP is cheaper so I go with that. A loaf of this bread costs me roughly $1 for ingredients.

How to use Bakers percentage: There is a complicated explanation of how to do this here if you want to know the technique inside and out.

However, to make this easy; know that the flour weight is key.

If I want a 600g loaf of bread I’ll mix that as 80% AP and 20% Whole Wheat. That gives it a nice nutty flavor of the whole wheat with the structure of the higher protein content of the AP. I’m not a big fan of 100% whole wheat – but it’s very much possible in this method.

For an 80% hydration dough – I take the total volume of flour (600gm or 480g AP (80%) + 120g Whole Wheat (20%) and find 80% or in this case, it would be 480g of water. 

For Salt and yeast:
Salt = 2% of flour volume
Yeast = ~1% of flour volume. Since this goes overnight I use slightly less than 1% it’s closer to 0.8%.

Using this method you can easily scale the recipe up or down depending on what you want.

Small Loaf Ingredients:

320 g flour
80 g whole wheat flour
320 g water
8 g salt (non-iodized)
3 g active dry yeast

Large Loaf Ingredients:

480 g flour
120 g whole wheat flour
480 g water
12 g salt (non-iodized)
5 g active dry yeast

Directions

Day One (10 min + 24 hours proof time):

1. Add all dry ingredients to a container you can cover.
2. Stir to blend.
3. Add water
4. Stir to combine – you don’t have to overwork this.
5. Cover and let stand somewhere at room temp for 24 hours.

Day Two (active time 10 min – rest 30 min – bake ~40 min):

• Scrape down the side of the container a bit.
• Turn out very wet and sticky dough on a floured surface.

• Work gently – you don’t really have to knead this. Just pop the huge bubbles and form a round ball with fairly tight skin. It is sticky so use some flour!
• Place in parchment-lined or cornmeal coated cast iron skillet

• Cover and set aside to proof for about 30 min.
• Heat oven to 450 degrees F
• Slash the top of the bread with a sharp knife to allow for expansion
• Bake for 30-40 min until internal temp is about 205 degrees F
• Turn onto a rack and let cool completely (at least 45 min if you can’t wait).

Hydration Percentage:

Stiff Texture (bagels or pretzels)
Hydration: 50 – 57%
Result: dense crumb – takes a ton of kneading to develop gluten. Not sticky

Standard Texture (Sandwich bread, rolls, you  know – standard bread)
Hydration 58 – 65%
Result: tacky but not sticky, supple, and easy to work with. Holds shape well with a uniform crumb and greater volume in proofing.

Rustic texture (Pizza, Focaccia, No-Knead, Ciabatta)
Hydration 65 – 80% or more
Result: very sticky and wet. Kneading is difficult can use stretch and fold or long proofing time. Requires careful shaping and sometimes more bake time to prevent gumminess.