No-knead breads

[Mike Nolan]

Article on no-knead breads. Using self-rising flour is IMHO kind of a cheat. Some of the pictures look like a quick bread, not a yeasted bread.

We Tested the 3 Best Ways To Bake No-Knead Bread at Home, and We Feel Very Strongly About the Results

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[Joan Simpson]

I agree, they look heavy.

[cwcdesign]

I read through the article and she specified that she used Red Star Active Dry Yeast. In the directions of the recipes, she says instant yeast.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't know whether to attribute the differences in specifying the yeast to poor editing or to an author who really doesn't understand the difference between ADY and IDY. (And to be fair, I've seen articles from Red Star that also seemed to be confused about the differences in their own products.)

[BakerAunt]

The article seems more about product advertising, via the links, than about serious baking.

Most flatbreads are best eaten right after they are made, as they become stiff when they cool.

That third loaf looks like a quick bread. I would not want to use it for sandwiches.

I'm not sure she used her homemade self-rising flour for the second loaf, which seems to be Jim Lahey's bread. One does not need Tick Tock to bake it.

None of these recipes will inspire people to bake and to keep baking. A regular simple yeast loaf, such as the Austrian Malt Bread or Paddy's bread, would be more likely to spark a desire to keep baking.

[Mike Nolan]

Either of those recipes, or many others, would make a better loaf than even the NYT no-knead bread.

The link was sent to me by a friend who follows this site but does not do much baking herself.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Is yogurt the new way for home bakers to make starter-less "sourdough"?

It's in the recipe Mike and I tested. It's in one of these instead of a levain.

As for self-rising flour there seem to be more and more recipes counting it as one ingredient. Is a box of cake mix one ingredient? Just add water and it is a two ingredient recipe!

[Mike Nolan]

Maybe that recipe was looking for 'active culture' yogurt, which I don't think most yogurts are, it didn't specify greek yogurt.

We haven't been eating much yogurt lately, I don't care for it at all, for several years that was my wife's breakfast but she's been on a cottage cheese and fruit kick lately.

I couldn't find a small container of plain yogurt, so I bought a small one of vanilla yogurt, that seemed like the least 'flavored' one in a small container. (A quart of plain yogurt would have been $3.00 or more, and 99% of it would have gone to waste.)

I actually thought about using kefir instead of yogurt for the einkorn test bread, because active culture kefir is getting easier to find, for some reason. Sour cream was another possibility I considered.

In any event, I didn't see any indication of any kind of fermentation activity in the preferment for that bread, but it seemed to come out OK.

BTW, that einkorn bread made pretty good fried cheese sandwiches last night. I paired it with some Cabot 'seriously sharp' cheddar cheese. Dipped in tomato soup, the cheese sandwiches on the einkorn bread were really good.

Self-rising flour isn't something I see on shelves here much, it's more of a Southern thing, although we saw more self-rising flour than AP flour when we were in England and Ireland 17 years ago. I'd consider it a single-ingredient item in the same way that I'd consider baking powder a single-ingredient item.

[BakerAunt]

Mike is correct about finding unsweetened yogurt with live cultures in small containers. Even with the large containers, a lot of yogurt these days is thickened with food starch, which is cheaper for the manufacturer but reduces the nutritional value of yogurt made completely with milk. I can only find the quarts of Stonyfield yogurt that I use as starter for my own yogurt, and I had to settle for full fat, as no store close to us sells the low-fat that I could easily find at stores where we lived in Texas. Indeed, my frustration led to my dusting off a yogurt maker I had never used and getting into making my own, six small jars at a time. It also turned out to be more economical, as well as more nutritious.

Yogurt has a different kind of "tang" from sourdough or from buttermilk. I usually replace yogurt in bread recipes with buttermilk. I doubt that the active cultures in the yogurt (does buttermilk have active cultures?) can replace a levain, but it does make breads more tender and helps the rise a bit. S. Wirth (I think of her often) told us that buttermilk increases the "keeping quality" of breads.

I seem to recall that Paddy had a recipe for a buttermilk-based starter, but I never explored it, as I have a milk-based one that I have kept going for about thirty years.

[Mike Nolan]

I think the buttermilk plant relies on there being an active culture in the buttermilk that is used to seed it, otherwise it wouldn't regenerate itself.

[Mike Nolan]

I sent a followup note to Unified Mills speculating what they were after when using yogurt in the preferment, I don't expect a response until next week at the earliest.

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