WEEK
29
Kneadless to Say

Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child, I can’t make head or tail out of it.
—Groucho Marx in Duck Soup

“Oh, jeez,” I moaned to Anne when I came home from work. “Connie’s bringing in bread Monday. A”—I made quotation marks with my fingers—“‘fantastic new, easy-to-make’ bread she wants me to taste.”

“Bittman’s no-knead?”

“What else?”

“Oh, jeez.”

I’d stopped telling people I was making bread, because the next thing out of their mouths was invariably, “Have you tried that no-knead bread?”

I told Anne I was going to tattoo the answer onto my forehead (right under “No, kids, I am not making croissants”) and save them the trouble. Even when I wasn’t talking bread, I couldn’t escape this glutinous tidal wave. Once, while we were looking at Dutch ovens in a kitchen-supply store, a salesman wandered over and offered, unsolicited, “They’re great for making that no-knead bread.”

“That no-knead bread” was a reference to an article by the New York Times food writer Mark Bittman, who’d breathlessly described a “revolutionary” new method of baking bread that produced an “incredible, fine-bakery quality, European-style boule” that “a 4-year-old could master.”

That assessment (Bittman raised the minimum age to eight) came from the recipe’s creator, Jim Lahey of Manhattan’s Sullivan Street Bakery. For home bakers, Lahey promised no less than the holy grail: easy-to-make bread that required almost no time and effort—and, most notably, no kneading—yet produced a fantastic crust and perfect crumb.

If a kitchen technique ever needed a good PR firm, it’s kneading, with its reputation as an onerous, burdensome process to be avoided at all costs. Kneading can be tedious if done by hand, but most kitchens these days probably have either a food processor or a stand mixer, both of which do a perfectly fine job without effort, although by now I’d completely stopped using mine. Having been forced to knead by hand in our Maine rental cottage, I’d discovered how easy it was if preceded by a twenty- to thirty-minute autolyse. That resting period for the dough (combined with the already-developed gluten in the levain) does much of the preliminary work for you, greatly shortening the kneading time. Thus after returning from Maine I’d stuck with hand kneading, a seven-minute process I found relaxing and enjoyable. With each week I was becoming more familiar with the dough, able to tell by feel when it was ready and when it wasn’t, a skill you never acquire when kneading by machine.

Still, after months of being asked about no-knead bread, I decided it was high time to find out what everyone else was talking about. I dug out the recipe and, to my surprise, immediately found something appealing about it that I had originally missed: the promise of a perfectly steamed crust. Like me, Bittman had struggled to make adequate steam in his home oven, even “filling a pot with stones and preheating it, then pouring boiling water over the stones to create a wet sauna (quite effective but dangerous).”

To say the least.

Lahey’s recipe, though, required neither hot rocks nor kneading to produce a perfect artisan boule. What was his secret? A wet, wet dough; an eighteen-hour autolyse in place of kneading; and a heavy pot, covered for the first half hour of baking.

It all made perfect sense. If the dough was wet enough, the strands of gluten could move around and align themselves without being forced into place physically. The wet dough took care of the need for steam as well, for it steamed itself inside the pot. Not owning a Dutch oven (if the salesman’s pitch had been, “They’re great for roast chicken,” I might’ve), I borrowed a wonderfully ancient oval one of cast aluminum, which Anne’s brother had grabbed from their mother’s kitchen before I could get my hands on it, and got to work. This really was a wet dough—the hydration was a dripping 75 percent or so. After letting the dough sit overnight on the countertop, I set out the next morning to form a boule as directed. Except it was impossible to form anything with this gloppy mess. “Put dough seam side down on towel,” the recipe instructed. Seam? How could you possibly have a seam with this glop? It wasn’t dough; it was thick batter. I wondered if I’d made my mixture too wet. If so, it wasn’t my fault; the recipe gave all the ingredients in volume (grrrr!), using the unreliable “scoop and sweep” method for measuring flour, no doubt a concession to the home bakers without kitchen scales at whom the article was aimed.

Instead of using a towel to form the boule, I pulled out my linen couche, a heavy cloth used for proofing long loaves, floured it thoroughly, and put the gloppy mess on it in a shape as close to a ball as I could muster. Two hours later, the dough had risen and was ready to go into the preheated Dutch oven. Now, how to flop this wet mass of batter into a 450-degree pot without scorching myself? Bittman’s suggestion was to “slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot.” Which I did. Nothing happened. The dough hung upside down, clinging to the cloth like a sleeping bat. I pulled at it with my fingers, and it started to descend slowly, resembling some kind of otherworldly protoplasm.

Finally the slowly sagging goop reached the hot metal, where it sizzled and hissed and gave off a puff of steam, but the other end of it was still attached to my couche, stretching out like Silly Putty. What a mess! Using my metal bench scraper (a handy five-by-seven-inch metal blade in a wooden handle, used for dividing dough and scraping up flour), I skimmed off as much as I could from the couche, giving up the pretense that I was dealing with anything resembling a loaf, and got the damned thing in the oven before it finished frying.

I turned my attention to cleaning up. My new couche was virtually ruined, permeated with the batter, the kitchen littered everywhere with little globs of dough: clinging to the coffeemaker, dripping off the countertop, stuck to my jeans. An hour later, I flipped out the bread. To my surprise, it fell out cleanly. The crust—and there was a lot of it, because the dough had spread out to cover the bottom of the pot—was golden and shiny and covered with appealing blisters. It looked appetizing but more resembled pastry crust than bread crust.

The “boule” was all of two inches high. Rustic boule? Hardly. The crust was crispy and thin as promised, but without the sweetness and depth of my peasant bread crusts. The bread itself lacked flavor, which was surprising, given its eighteen-hour fermentation at room temperature. Yet it wasn’t a total loss: when I sliced into this flat, oval loaf, my suspicions were confirmed: I had made a pretty good ciabatta, that flat Italian white bread with a delicate, crispy crust and an airy interior ideal for dipping into olive oil.

“Are you going to be working with this method again, Dad?” Zach asked, enjoying a slice. “Trying to make your perfect loaf?”

I thought about that for a moment. Making this bread had been about as much fun as doing the dishes. Bittman and Lahey truly seemed to think this method would spark a revolution, creating a nation of new home bread bakers, enabled by this easy, no-knead, no-steam method of baking bread. As with van Over’s hope for a food-processor-bread revolution, I suspect they will be disappointed, for all have missed something essential: when it comes to bread, the end does not necessarily justify the means. Still, I was glad I had done the experiment. It reminded me that there’s more to bread than bread. This isn’t simply about lunch. The process needs to be rewarding.

“No, Zach, I have to give the Dutch oven back to Uncle John,” I said, pulling a hunk of dough out of my hair. Then I went upstairs to take a shower, and as the water ran down my back, I thought about my answer. Why was I so quick to dismiss a promising if imperfect and unsatisfying method after only a single try? What was I in fact after? If I thought we made bread because it took us to another place, what was that place for me?

Why bread? Why me? Why now?

I needed a good shrink.