No-knead bread: five minutes of work and fourteen hours of waiting
The method of New York baker Jim Lahey, made famous by The New York Times in 2006, transformed home bread baking. Kneading exists to develop gluten — and it turns out time does the same job for free. A wet dough left for a dozen hours or more builds its own gluten network. The second pillar is a preheated cast-iron pot: covered, it becomes a steam oven and gives a crust that is hard to achieve on an open tray.
Your own work in that: 0 min.
- Fermentation 845 min
- Shaping 100 min
- Baking 50 min
- Cooling 60 min
Step by step
0 / 6 doneMix it and forget it
In a large bowl stir the flour, salt and yeast with a spoon, add the water and stir 60 seconds, until no dry flour remains. The dough should be sticky and shaggy, not smooth — don't knead it, don't work it, just cover the bowl and walk away.
Ingredients: 500 g strong bread flour · 400 ml water · 2 g dried yeast · 10 g salt
TipHalf a teaspoon of yeast for half a kilo of flour looks like a misprint. It isn't: over fourteen hours more yeast would eat every sugar and the bread would be sour and flat.
Sticky and shaggy, one minute with a spoonFerment for fourteen hours
Leave the bowl at room temperature (about 20 °C) for 12–18 hours. The dough should double, cover itself in bubbles and smell faintly sour. In that time enzymes break down starch and the gluten arranges itself into a network.
TipIn a warm kitchen (24 °C) ten hours is enough; in a cold one (17 °C) it needs eighteen. Watch the bubbles, not the clock.
Doubled, bubbled, faintly sourFold and shape
Dust the counter generously and tip the dough out with a scraper. Fold it three times like a letter, turning between folds, then tuck the edges underneath to form a round. Don't press — this is about surface tension, not about expelling air.
Ingredients: 60 g flour for dusting · 2 tbsp semolina
Three letter folds, then tuck the edges underProve and preheat the pot
Set the round seam down on baking paper dusted with semolina, cover with a cloth and leave 90 minutes. After 45 minutes put the empty cast-iron pot with its lid into the oven and heat at 240 °C for a full 45 minutes.
TipThe pot must be fully heated, or the dough spreads sideways before a crust can form. Forty-five minutes is a minimum, not a suggestion.
Score and bake covered
Score the top 1 cm deep with a sharp blade. Lower the dough on its paper into the hot pot (it burns), cover and bake 30 minutes at 240 °C. Under the lid the dough's own steam cannot escape and the loaf expands to its maximum.
A one-centimetre score, then the lid onUncover and finish
Take the lid off, drop to 220 °C and bake another 15–20 minutes, until the crust is deep brown and the loaf sounds hollow when tapped underneath. Cool on a rack for at least an hour.
TipPale bread is underbaked bread. Take the crust darker than instinct suggests — that is where all the aroma lives.
Deep brown crust, hollow when tapped
Before you start
Why it works
Gluten forms by itself when flour is wet enough and given time. Kneading only speeds the process up. At 80 % hydration and fourteen hours it is simply unnecessary.
Without a cast-iron pot
Any lidded ovenproof pot works: steel, ceramic, heatproof glass. What matters is the lid, and that the pot heats up with the oven.
With seeds
Add 80 g of seeds (sunflower, pumpkin, linseed) and 40 ml more water — dry seeds pull water out of the dough. Stir them in at the spoon-mixing stage.
How to store it
Keep a cut loaf cut side down on the board, under a cloth, not in plastic. The crust stays crisp for two days. A plastic bag softens it within hours.
