Basic · Year-round
No-knead baguette
Twenty hours of fermentation, two minutes of work. Blistered crust, wild crumb.
After Holyburgers closed in Groningen I had a year of doing nothing in particular. I'd just moved to Spain with no plan and no clients yet, so I baked bread instead of waking up at 11 like a lost man. Every loaf the first month was a brick. The second month they were still bricks but I'd accepted it.
Then I met Jean-Marc, an old French baker who'd retired to Marbella twenty years ago and was bored enough to talk to me. He didn't bother explaining hydration ratios or autolyse. He told me one thing: twenty hours, and a tray of water in the oven. Everything else is noise.
This is what came out the other side. It's the only bread recipe I trust on its own without thinking. Mix in the evening, sleep on it, bake in the morning. Whatever you do for the next twenty hours, the bread does its own work.
- Total time
- 35 min
- Serves
- 2 people
- Difficulty
- 2 / 5
- Pair with
- Soft butter, good olive oil, soup. Anything.
Ingredients
- 400 gwheat flour (T65 or strong bread flour)
- 100 gwholemeal wheat flour
- 10 gsalt
- 2 ginstant yeast
- 380 mlwater, lukewarm
For baking
- as neededrice flour or semolina to dust the cloth
Method
- 1
Evening: mix the flours, salt and yeast in a large bowl. Pour in the water, mix with a wet hand until no dry flour remains. No kneading.
- 2
Cover, leave 12-18 hours at room temperature. The dough should double and the surface should be lumpy and full of air.
- 3
Tip onto a heavily floured surface. Divide in two. Fold each piece three times (envelope), flip, shape into a loose baguette.
- 4
Set on a cloth dusted with rice flour, with pleats between the baguettes. Cover, prove 1 hour.
- 5
Heat oven to 250 °C with a cast-iron tray inside. Put a small dish of water on the bottom rack for steam.
- 6
Slash four deep diagonals with a razor or sharp knife. Slide onto the hot tray, shut the oven.
- 7
Bake 22-25 minutes. Deeply coloured, blistered, hollow when tapped underneath. Rest 20 minutes on a rack before cutting.
