I’m only blogging it because the recipe is so good and so simple. I don’t want to forget it. I got it from About.com. The dough takes about two hours to rise and about forty-five minutes to cook. You need to let it cool for at least fifteen minutes, so this is a three hour recipe.

Ingredients
1 cup milk
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup warm water
2 packages active dry yeast
2 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp salt
1 cup of warm water
6-7 cups of unbleached bread flour

Preparation

Heat 1 cup of milk and 2 tbsp butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Remove from heat when the butter is melted. Set aside to cool.

Pour 1/2 cup of warm water into a small bowl. Slowly pour yeast into bowl while stirring. The constant stirring while adding the yeast will prevent the dry yeast from clumping. Set the bowl of yeast water aside for about 5 minutes while you work on the next 2 steps.

In a large bowl, add sugar, salt, and 1 cup of warm water. Mix.

Check the small saucepan of milk and butter. If the contents are warm to the touch, pour the liquid into the large bowl and mix.

Pour the yeast water into the large bowl. It is important that the batter is warm, not boiling hot. Hot liquid, such as the milk you heated up, will kill the dry yeast and prevent the bread from rising.

Begin mixing in the unbleached bread flour, one cup at a time. By the fifth cup of flour, the dough will begin to get stiff and it will be difficult to mix it with the wooden spoon. Turn dough out onto a floured board and begin to knead the dough. Continue adding more flour and kneading the flour into the dough until the dough is smooth, not sticky.

Next, grease a large bowl with butter. Put the bread dough into the bowl and then turn the dough over so that the top of the dough is now buttered. Cover the bowl with a kitchen towel and let the dough rise at room temperature until double in size or about 1 hour.

Punch down dough. Turn it out onto a floured board and knead out all the bubbles for about 5 minutes. Divide the dough in half and form each half into a loaf by rolling the dough into a rectangle. Roll the dough up like a jellyroll. Pinch seam closed. Pinch and tuck edges under the loaf.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Butter two loaf pans. Spread a light layer of yellow cornmeal on the loaf pans, if desired. Set loaves in pans, cover with kitchen towel, and allow to rise until double in size or for about a half hour.

Bake bread for about 45 minutes or until golden brown. Remove bread from oven and turn out loaves onto a rack or a clean kitchen towel. Allow to cool before cutting.

I mixed everything in the stand mixer and kneaded it with the dough hook on the second setting for a few minutes. It’s taken me years to learn what dough looks like when it’s wet, dry, smooth, etc. This dough gets worked until it’s smooth. Then I transferred it to a buttered bowl to rise. I like the crust you get on French bread better than standard white bread, so I brushed an egg white over the dough just before baking. I also like the crunch from corn meal on the underside of bread (and pizza crust), so I sprinkled some inside the bread pans. This is what the inside should look like when it’s done right.

I followed the recipe from Saveur Magazine. Here’s everything you need:

Homemade Braided Challah Bread

• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons milk, heated to 115°
• 1/4 cup plus 1 teaspoon sugar
• 2 teaspoons active dry yeast
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted (plus more for greasing)
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 4 cups flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon water

Get a big bowl and a little bowl. In the big bowl, stir together the milk, 1 teaspoon of the sugar, and all of the yeast. Let it sit until the yeast activates and gets foamy, maybe ten minutes. While the yeast is waking up, whisk together the room temperature butter with the two eggs.

When the yeast mixture looks kind of like a cappuccino, add the butter/egg mixture to the big bowl and stir to combine. Add the flour, remaining sugar and salt, and stir with a wooden spoon until a dough forms.

It’s a dry dough, so it won’t come together immediately. Still, if you can’t get most of the dough to come together into a ball, you should add a few tablespoons of water to the bowl and keep mixing. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth, maybe 6–8 minutes. Wash and grease the big bowl with butter. Toss in the dough ball and cover with plastic wrap. Let it sit until doubled in size, about an hour. Uncover, punch dough down and re-cover. Let it sit for another thirty minutes until slightly puffed.

Drop the dough ball back onto your floured work surface and cut into three or four equal-sized pieces. Roll them into ropes of equal length. I drafted the wife to braid them. Apparently it’s easy to braid three ropes, but we had to watch this tutorial on how to braid four. Make sure you pinch the ends and let the braided dough puff up for another hour on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

Heat oven to 375°. Stir together the egg yolk and 1 tbsp. water in a small bowl and brush all over the surface of the loaf.

The recipe calls for you to sprinkle evenly with sesame seeds, but I thought I’d bake it plain first. Bake until loaf is dark golden brown, about 30–35 minutes. Transfer the bread to a wire rack and let cool for 30 minutes before serving. It’s a pretty impressive loaf that tears easily at the braids.

This is what the inside looks like.

My bread came out a little dry. I’ll make a wetter dough next time.

If you’re one of those people who cares more about form than function, you can pony up an additional $14 to Le Creuset for a stainless steel replacement knob that “can withstand any oven temperature.”

Here’s my basic recipe: Chad Chandler’s (Almost) No-Knead Bread Recipe It looks complicated, but it’s really not. Once you bake a loaf of bread, you’ve essentially mastered and memorized the cooking process.

I’ve tried all kinds of techniques to infuse flavorful ingredients throughout the bread. I’m sure there are other (probably better) methods, but here are my personal tips and techniques I’ve picked up along the way:

• Don’t be a tight-ass and substitute another brand of flour. Buy the blue and white bag of King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour. It only costs a dollar more. You can use all-purpose flour when you do the kneading, but that’s the only time. The King Arthur brand is high-protein, so it absorbs more liquid. That means you can incorporate more flavor into your bread without gumming it up (by gummy, I mean moist and dense and doughy).
• It’s okay to use water to make the dough, but beer has more flavor. Start with a 50/50 ratio of beer and water. Once you’re making good bread, feel free to start experimenting with different flavored beers and the beer/water ratio.
• Beer doesn’t drastically alter the taste of the bread. It’s more like a subtle under-taste, if that makes any sense. I like to use Michelob Amberbock, Dundee’s Honey Brown, Budweiser and Bud Light’s new Golden Wheat. Really, it’s just an excuse for me to buy a six-pack of something different.
• I like wheat bread, but I never use more than ¾ cup of wheat flour in my recipes. I don’t know the science at work here, but it seems like more wheat = gummier bread.
• If I’m adding wet ingredients like honey, olive oil, vinegar, tahini, roasted garlic, etc… I add them when I mix the dough.
• If I’m adding solid ingredients like grated asiago cheese, fresh herbs, chopped olives, roasted sunflower seeds, etc… I add them when I knead the dough, just prior to its second rise.
• You have to add at least 4 big squeezes (4 tbsp?) of honey to the dough to be able to taste it, and even then it’s just a mild flavor.
• Dried herbs add little to no flavor to the bread. It just makes it look moldy.
• You can add 2 teaspoons of almost any wet ingredient (like apple cider vinegar or sherry) to the dough and barely taste it (if at all). So when you’re experimenting with new ingredients, start small. That way, if it doesn’t taste great, you don’t really ruin the loaf.
• There’s no reason to be afraid of kneading; you’re just stretching the bread dough. Fold the dough over and onto itself, flatten it, turn it a little, and repeat the process about 20 times. It’s more important to be consistent in the way you knead than to have the perfect form. Being consistent means you stretch all the dough evenly.
• I don’t put a lot of oil in the pot that I cook the bread in. I usually just drizzle in a little sunflower oil and rub it all over with a paper towel. From my experience, too much oil makes the bottom crust too hard.
• You MUST let the bread cool for at least an hour.
• You can control how hard the crust is by using foil when the bread cools. If you like really crispy crust, then let the bread cool alone on a rack. If you like your crust soft, let it cool wrapped in foil. I wrap mine in foil for 30 minutes and the open the foil for the last half hour.

My favorite bread is asiago cheese bread. To make it, you follow my basic dough recipe until the kneading step. To add flavor, you finely grate about 5 ounces of fresh asiago cheese. Next, lightly flour your working surface. Plop the dough onto the working surface and flatten it out into a large rectangle. Sprinkle about half of the cheese onto the dough:

Roll it up and repeat. Start folding the dough back onto itself. Each time you fold it, sprinkle in a little cheese on the dough. Also, as you add more flour to the working surface to keep the dough from sticking, add some cheese as well. That way you’re incorporating the cheese from two sides as you knead:

After a while, you shouldn’t be able to fold the dough anymore without seeing some cheese inside the dough (it should get very difficult to fold the dough anymore anyway):

Let the dough rise for a couple of hours in a well-oiled bowl:

When you drop the dough ball into the oven-warmed pot, sprinkle a tiny bit of cheese on the top. Finally, cook the bread like my recipe instructs. The same goes for any bread that has solid ingredients in the center.

Look at the crust on this asiago cheese bread:

And check out this honey-rosemary bread. To make it, I omitted the cider vinegar and garlic powder in the basic recipe and replaced them with 5 big squeezes of honey. Then I incorporated a little white sugar and some chopped, fresh rosemary during the kneading process. It came out great:

This is some garlic and herb bread:

I used about a quarter cup of chopped garlic. It roasts inside the bread, so the flavor is pretty mild. I also added a handful of chopped oregano, sage and parsley.

I store my bread in a large ziplock bag. When there are leftovers, I peel the crust off and cut the bread into cubes. Then I leave them on the counter overnight and in the morning I have flavorful croutons. I usually freeze them until I’m ready to make breadcrumbs.

I recently tossed them in the food processor to make breadcrumbs for some meatballs. They came out light and plump like panko, but with the infused flavors of garlic, cheese and herbs:

I soaked them in some buttermilk we had left over from my wife’s fresh batch of homemade butter and the meatballs came out tender and flavorful. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to the bland, grainy breadcrumbs that come in the round box.

UPDATE: Here’s another tip I should have mentioned.

Chad Chandler’s (Almost) No-Knead Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

• 3 Cups *King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour
• 2 Teaspoons Table Salt
• 1 Tablespoon Garlic Powder
• ¼ Teaspoon Instant Yeast
• ¾ Cup Warm Water
• ¾ Cup Beer (plus extra if needed)
• 2 Tablespoons Cider Vinegar
• All Purpose Flour (as needed for dusting work surface and kneading)
• 1 Tablespoon Olive Oil (or an oil with a higher smoke point)

Instructions:

1. Pour dry ingredients (flour, yeast, salt and garlic powder) into a large bowl and mix with a rubber spatula.
   
   
2. Add all wet ingredients (water, beer and vinegar) to the dry mixture. Using spatula, fold dough lumps over and over, scraping up dry flour from the bottom of the bowl until it starts coming together. After a while, you should have a big, sticky mass. When done right, you’ll have to scrape the dough off the spatula. If all the flour hasn’t come together after a minute, add a little more beer a splash ata time until it does. It’ll seem to magically go directly from too dry to too wet. That’s normal.
   
   
3. Cover the bowl with a non-terry cloth towel and let it sit at room temperature for about 16 hours. There’s not much difference between dough that rests for 12-20 hours, but 16 is my arbitrary default.
   
   
4. I know it says “no-knead” in the title, but you need to work the dough a little. If the yeast has done its job over the past 16 hours, the dough ball flattened out and bubbled like this: (the wetter the dough, the larger the mass)
   
   
   
   You just need to re-shape it into a ball. Plus, the light kneading process will make it rise more. Lightly flour a work surface and rub some on your hands. Slowly scrape the dough out of the bowl with your finger tips, like this:
   
   
   
   Knead the dough just enough times to make it less sticky and form a ball (maybe 15-20 times), adding more flour whenever it starts to stick to the working surface.
   
   
5. Clean the dough bowl and spray the bottom with non-stick spray (or rub some olive oil around with a paper towel). Drop the kneaded dough ball back into the bowl and let it rise again for 2 hours.
   
   
6. At about the 1½ hour mark, put a lightly-oiled dutch oven in the middle of the stove and preheat it to 425°. Most recipes call for a 6 quart pot, but my 4 quart Chantal dutch oven (fake Le Creuset from TJ Maxx) works fine. You want to get it really hot before you put the bread in it. That way the bread is baking (and steaming) in an oven inside of an oven.
   
   
7. At the two-hour mark, carefully take the pot out of the oven and remove the lid. A little smoke should escape. Without distorting the dough ball too much, pick it up and plop it into the center of the heated pot. Using kitchen shears, cut a small, shallow slit in the top of the dough ball to let some steam escape. Cover with the hot lid and put the pot back in the oven.
   
   
8. After 30 minutes, take the lid off the pot. That’s the only time you should open the oven door. The bread should have risen, but it won’t have much of a crust on it yet.
   
   
9. After another 25-30 minutes, take the pot out of the oven. Use a towel to lift the bread out of the pot (or flip it upside-down and shake the bread loose) and let it cool on a raised rack for at least an hour.
   
   

This recipe might look complicated, but it’s really not. With minimal skill and effort, you end up with this:

The only drawback to my recipe is the time involved. Needless to say, this isn’t an impulse recipe. I usually mix my dough on Friday when I get home from work. It gives me a good excuse to pick up some beer on my way home. Whenever I wake up the next morning, I knead the dough and then run to the farmers’ market to do my weekly grocery shopping. When I get back, I preheat the pot in the oven and cook the bread. As long as the wife doesn’t eat too much over the weekend, it’ll last us the whole week. Whatever is left over goes into the freezer until I need to make bread crumbs.

Once you’ve mastered my basic recipe, learn how to add flavors to your no-knead bread.

*If you’re going to follow this recipe, you must use King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour (the blue and white bag). King Arthur is high-protein flour, which means it absorbs more liquid than generic, all-purpose flour. If you want to use another brand, you’ll have to cut down on the liquid.

I used the no-knead technique made famous by Mark Bittman and Jim Lahaney (video here), but I incorporated some tips from America’s Test Kitchen.

Here’s the recipe:

3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (15 ounces), plus additional for dusting work surface
1/4 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water (7 ounces), at room temperature
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons mild-flavored lager (3 ounces)
1 tablespoon white vinegar

Whisk flour, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Add water, beer, and vinegar. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.

I didn’t excerpt any more of the recipe above, because they dumb it down too much and include several unnecessary steps.

I used King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour, so I had to add more beer and water until the dough was the right consistency. I let mine set for about 20 hours. After that, I kneaded it about 20-25 times to firm up the dough ball and add some more flour. For the record, I used Michelob Ultra Amber to flavor the bread. If I’d had some Amberbock, I’d have gone with that instead.

Let it rise again for a couple of hours. Make sure you oil the bowl well, or else the dough ball will stick and you’ll have to shape it all over again. Here’s my dough ball:

For the last half hour or so, preheat the oven to 450° with an enamel-coated, cast iron dutch oven inside (the recipe calls for a 6 or 8 quart dutch oven, but I used a 4 quart and it came out fine). The dutch oven traps in the moisture so the dough steams as it cooks. That is the genius behind this recipe. If you’re planning on putting your pot in the oven often, then you should replace the plastic handle with a metal knob.

After two hours, the dough is ready to go into the well-heated dutch oven. Sprinkle some four on top of the dough and spray some non-stick spray all over the inside of pot:

Next, cut a half-inch deep slit across the top to allow the steam to escape and drop the dough ball in the middle of the pot. Then place the pot (with lid) back in the oven. Lower the heat to 425° and set the timer for 30 minutes.

After half an hour, take the lid off the dutch oven and set the timer for another 30 minutes. The bread is ready when the internal temperature reaches 210°.

I should point out that I messed up when I reset the timer for the last 30 minutes of baking and accidentally reset it to the default 350°. I ended up having to bake it covered and uncovered for another 30 minutes at 450°, meaning to took me almost 90 minutes to finish my bread. My dough didn’t crust up at all for the first hour. I should also mention that my instant-read thermometer never reached 210°. I could only get it to 200°. Maybe my thermometer isn’t properly calibrated?

This recipe is apparently very forgiving, since I screwed up and it still come out great. Look at the light and airy interior:

I made this 1 1/2 lb loaf on Friday afternoon and it’s already almost gone. I made some fresh bruschetta topping (oven-roasted tomatoes, peppers, shallots & garlic, blended with parmesan) to spread on the sliced bread. Every time I turn around, my wife is cutting off another piece. At this rate, it’ll be gone by tonight. I’ll definitely make this again, and soon. Next time I think I’ll substitute Dundee’s Honey Brown for the lager and use apple cider vinegar instead of white.

It seemed simple enough, so I gave it a try.

I followed the recipe exactly. The batter came together just like he said in the video, and I let the dough rise for about 19 hours. Here’s what my loaf looked like before cooking:

I let it bake for about 35 minutes. I really don’t have any experience with baking bread, so I didn’t know how to tell when it was done. I thumped the crust and it *felt done, so I took it out and let it cool.

When I sliced a few pieces, it was apparent I took it out a little too early:

The bread tasted good, but it was still a little doughy in the center. I put it back in the oven for about 8 minutes to let the interior finish cooking. After that, the bottom crust became as hard as a rock. So for anyone attempting this recipe, I would suggest baking the bread for about 42 minutes and throwing a half cup of water onto the oven floor just before closing the door. That way it will steam enough to keep the crust from getting too hard.

*Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to “know” when the bread is done, and how to keep the bottom crust from getting rock hard?