never made bread? bake this
you don't need the bread gift to make the stuff of life
In an accidentally apropos twist, I spent part of this Memorial Day weekend at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, where I learned that the man had a massive stick up his ass and a penchant for fantastic verbiage. But all he really seemed to want was to spend time in his gardens and eat fabulous meals with his wife — relatable vibes, GW.
Today we are discussing bread, because I’m making some tonight and also because freshly-baked bread is the stuff of life. If you’re reading this in the evening and have even ten minutes before you need to sleep, you can make the bread that is the subject of this newsletter — and you should.
I’m not a bread baker, connoisseur, or even one of those people who baked bread during the pandemic. I have never fed a sourdough starter in my life. The few times I’ve tried to make french bread, baguettes, whole wheat boules, or any of the other fluffy, crusty loaves you can find only in the morning at a bakery, they’ve been dense and chewy and unappetizing.
Others have the touch. One of my coworkers at the farmer’s market once woke up at four in the morning to bake me a sourdough boule that was still warm three hours later, when we met in the dark to lug vegetables from a truck. Apparently my boyfriend has made many a gorgeous loaf (not that I’ve tasted the proof, ahem).
But not I. And unusually for me, I don’t feel insecure about this. I don’t need to be better than everyone around me at every kitchen skill, just some of them.
The list of things I know about bread and bread-making is longer than I can write, and yet it’s just one planet-sized collection of atoms in the universe that is BREAD. I know that bread can proof for a very long time at cold temperatures. I know that more liquid, sloppier dough often produces airier, higher-rising bread. I know that freshly-milled wheat from an ancient or heirloom variety will actually make your bread taste like you imagine it might have in the era of George Washington, when bread was one of the few reliably great foodstuffs the world had going for it. I know that yeasts live in the air and on the counters of active bakeries and kitchens, creeping their way into everything you eat.
I know that you can spend a lifetime making perfect sourdough boules and only at the end of your life believe that maybe, finally, you understand the science of bread.
And it’s this — that bread-making is an art that rewards a lifetime of devotion — that makes me okay with the fact that I am not a bread maker. I respect the work too much to pretend otherwise, and I’d like to be friends with all of you who have ventured further down that path than me. (If you’re interested in making bread a lifetime obsession, I hear the Tartine bread book is the penultimate bible.)
That doesn’t mean, however, that I can’t bake an occasional loaf of totally delicious bread. Anyone can. While you usually need a sourdough starter to make unbeatable bakery loaves, instant yeast and the overnight no-knead technique really shine in two specific areas. The first, enriched breads (anything with sugar, milk, or butter, like brioche and challah) are pretty close to spectacular with a reliably good recipe and some fresh yeast. And the second, whole-wheat filled breads made via the overnight no-knead technique, are also basically foolproof, again with a reliably good recipe and yeast.
This second type of bread is the one I’m making tonight, and it’s the easiest thing I know how to bake. The recipe, linked here, comes from King Arthur Flour, which offers an encyclopedic repository of bread and baked goods recipes that are almost always great. And, if you’re buying flour for cooking and baking, King Arthur is by far the best quality of all the national grocery store brands, by the way (KAF, sponsor me!).
Here’s the method: You throw whole wheat flour, yeast, water, salt, dried fruit, and chopped nuts into a bowl, mix it all together, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it sit. In the morning, you wake up, take the mixture out of the bowl, shape it into a ball, and, if you’re really feeling yourself, give it a couple of minutes of “shaping.” (Here’s a link on how to do it, though honestly you don’t need to for this recipe if you don’t care much about the shape). You then put the ball of dough into the pan in which the bread will cook and cover it again with plastic wrap. After two hours, you cover the pan and bake it in the oven.
The bread that comes out of the oven after this extremely low-effort activity is a heavenly, crusty, flavor-packed loaf, nutty and warm from the wheat but also rich and airy in the way that defies the “health food” expectations implied by whole wheat. If you’ve ever eaten at Washington, D.C.’s stupidly iconic, often overhyped, but honestly great Le Diplomate, the bread basket offered at the beginning of every meal always includes a few dark, crusty slices bejeweled with dried fruits and nuts. This KAF no-knead loaf is essentially a dupe of the Le Dip bread. More than once, I have eaten only this bread, maybe plain or maybe slathered with salted butter, as my sole source of calories for a day. It isn’t sugary or fatty or salty, but biting into it activates ALL of the food pleasure centers. Bread. The stuff of life.
A couple of thoughts on the KAF recipe. You can really do any mix of dried fruits and soft nuts in place of the walnuts, pecans, raisins, and cranberries suggested. My favorite combo is pecans with dark raisins and cranberries, but I’ve also used pistachios and chopped dried apricots with great success, if that’s more your vibe. The crust on the bread gets crunchiest when I use my cast-iron dutch oven, if you happen to have one of those. And finally, DO NOT cut into it while it’s still hot. The insides will turn gummy. That’s just one of the rules of bread-baking: Bread allowed to cool until it’s just a little warm has far superior texture.
The no-knead technique is actually an ancient method, from the days before you could buy yeast in a jar and everyone had to use a starter. (Hello, George Washington again.) We think of bread kneading as an onerous but necessary task because the violence of the kneading helps form and toughen gluten, which creates structure and lift in the dough. But gluten also forms on its own, if flour is given enough time in the presence of water. Anyone who has ventured into serious bread-making has probably discovered this technique. It’s something that the professional bakers know instinctively. For the rest of us, it’s a little miracle that makes fresh-bread accessible.
Restaurant notes this week
$2 hot dogs: Johnny’s All-American, happy hour. Columbia Heights. Everything else is as divey as a dive bar could be.
the saltiest, spiciest, limiest blessing of a dinner: Thip Khao. Columbia Heights. Everyone knows this, but it never becomes less true. You must eat here. You must order the Nahm Tok, which is under the “salads” section but is actually a massive pile of delectable pork shoulder with some mint leaves.
Until next week, let’s all fantasize about when seasonal produce will start to include more than just asparagus. A great vegetable, but my body is a little weary of its omnipresence in my life…
