The first time I tried the recipe, I used the 1 5/8 cup water from the article. The dough was way too wet and sticky. After watching the video again, I noticed the guy in it says 1 1/2 cup water. I tried that and the results were much much better.

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Sounds like pain à l'ancienne.

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Check out the long thread about this bread at LTHForum.com:

http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=10612

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I wrote about Bittman's bread here:
http://electricstove.blogspot.com/2006/11/making-minimalist-mark-bittmans-no.html

I didn't use instant yeast, so mine came out too flat. After reading so many blog posts about it, now I know the substitution for next time.

Bittman founds his way back into food world spotlight for the second week in a row. This week, he suggested stuffing should be cooked outside the turkey.

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Can someone explain a bit more the whole thing about putting on some cornmeal or wheat on the towel and laying it over?

How does that part work? Do I put it on both towels or just the bottom one? What is that step for? Does it make the crust?

I know nothing about bread making so I have no idea what this part is for.

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Cummon, be fair! This is LAHEY bread or Sullivan Street Bakery bread. Let's give credit where credit is due and that's NOT to the reporter no matter how nifty the alliteration in Bittman bread is.

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Can we get the recipe please? Link to a site that requires login is wrong.

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This is a veeerrrryyyy wet dough. When it sits on a cotton towel (100% twill-weave cotton towels are now 49¢ each at IKea's Christmas tent) for 2 hours the dough and the towel want to share the moisture and merge into one another. Rubbing generous amounts of flour into both towels will give you better release from the one it sits *on*. Some people are putting cornmeal on the bottom one as well. Keep in mind this will become the top of your loaf.

After the 2 hour rise, the bread is turned onto the top towel and dropped in the hot pot with the seam up. This gives the rising crust a weak spot in the skin through which to rise.

Some people are also dropping some cornmeal into the bottom of the hot pot before they drop in the dough for better release from the pan.

Personally, I didn't have any prob with release from the towel or the pot but, like many others, thought the bread needed more salt for flavor.

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I decided to try it too, with excellent results - read about it at:
http://eventhorizon.org/cs/blogs/peter/archive/2006/11/08/26.aspx

It is similar to pain à l'ancienne, but even less working with the dough, less yeast, and a room temperature rise. I think the real genius here is the cooking technique - something I want to try on other bread recipes.

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Here it is. I read that 1 1/2 cups water is better,

Recipe: No-Knead Bread

Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery
Time: About 1½ hours plus 14 to 20 hours’ rising

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

1. In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

2. Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

3. Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

4. At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Yield: One 1½-pound loaf.

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Yes, use 1.5 cups water and notice that Lahey uses his measuring cup to scoop out the flour (instead of properly spooning the flour into the cup). I am making my second batch of this and it's even better than the first. I also subbed in about 3 Tbsp of whole wheat flour. My blog will be updated with new pictures tonight.

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I had no problems using 1 5/8 cups of water (390 mls...).

However, making a swiss cheese onion poppyseed loaf did result in the cheese causing the bread to stick to the pan. It was very tasty though!

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I tried it, check out this post: http://www.whatgeekseat.com/wordpress/?p=52
It didn't go well and by reading these comments I guess I should have used 1 1/2 cups of water instead of 1 5/8...but really 1/8 cup less water wouldn't have made that much of a difference.

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Punisher2K thanks for the recipe but does anyone know if the bread has to be cook in an iron cast pot or Dutch oven pot? I don't have either one but can I use regular pots?

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I've jumped on the no-knead bread bandwagon, and I'm never going back. 1 1/2 cups water worked for me, and I was able to pry the loaf off of the floured towel with a spatula.

Read about it here:
http://foodandpaper.blogspot.com/2006/11/no-need-to-knead.html

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I live on a small island, and we don't have a huge variety of goods here, the only yeast I'm able to get hold of is the active dry kind.

The recipe calls for 1/4tsp of instant yeast, if I activate 1/4tsp of this active dry kind in warm water, can I just follow the recipe as usual? Or would I have to use more of this yeast?

Hope someone can help, the bread looks fantastic!

To JD--I think the aspect of the pot is more that it's heavy so it retains more heat, so any heavy oven-capable pot with a good lid should do just fine.

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Next time I'll use 1.5 of water too, and bake it 10 minutes more without the lid (1 hour at all) , but I love this Bread, here it is, I hope next time my loaf will be prettier ! :-)
http://momsrecipesandmore.blogspot.com/2006/11/no-knead-bread-no-knead-bread-takes.html

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We've got about a dozen people who've tried it over here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/1437

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I also made the bread, and posted about it on my blog here:
http://virtualfrolic.blogspot.com/2006/11/no-work-makes-vf-happy-gal.html

I'm going to try out the bread including rosemary this time - hopefully it'll go well!

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Thanks Coin for the advice, my advice to the dry yeast is that I used 2 tablespoon of water from the 1 1/2 cup of water. But I don't think it's necessary to activate the yeast if it's fresh but if it's not, do the other method of activating the yeast. Otherwise, use the dump method.

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