No Knead Bread
What happens when you forget to program the bread machine? Another experiment! 🙂 So, yes I forgot to turn on the bread machine! So I returned home in the late evening to a soggy mush of flour, water and yeast with not enough time to set the machine to bake for three and a half hours. Not wanting to waste good ingredients, I decided to try out the ‘no knead bread’ theory… I’m fairly inexperienced in bread making. Mainly because I don’t have the patience for all the kneading and waiting around for the proving. It is great if you have a lot of time in the house that day and you’re doing chores or you can give the dough a quick knead in between writing blog posts. However I don’t have this situation come up very often so the bread machine has been a happy compromise! Until I forget to turn it on… 😦 So all I did with this bread was to mix all the ingredients into a rough ball of dough, then left in a cling film covered bowl over night (around 10 hours in total) then punched it down and formed into a ball to bake in the oven.
No Knead Bread
Ingredients
- 360g strong wholemeal flour
- 140g strong white flour
- 1.5 tsp bread machine yeast
- 375 ml water
- 1 tbs olive oil
- 1 tbs agave syrup
- 1 tsp sea salt
- poppy seeds
- pumpkin seeds
No Knead Bread
After baking in a hot oven for 40 minutes, I took the bread out. I did the tapping test and it sounded done. However upon cutting into the middle of the loaf, I found that it was under-baked so I stuck it back in the oven. This didn’t really help much as it was still quite mushy in the middle and the crust was just getting harder and harder! So my fellow bloggers, what has gone wrong?! The taste of the bread wasn’t great. it was bland and the poppy seeds didn’t really come through. The texture was OK (where it was cooked!), as you can see from the photos the dough was quite cakey and the air pockets are very small but the crumb was nice and crisp.
No Knead Bread
The things I think could have gone wrong are:
- I’ve used the wrong type of yeast (I have two types, one for bread machines and one for hand kneading- both are dried fast action)
- The oven wasn’t hot enough
- Wrong measurements for the ingredients required for ‘no knead’ bread.
I reckon that if I can master the art of no knead bread, then I can make a bit more space on the kitchen work tops by getting rid of the huge bread machine and maybe getting an ice-cream maker instead?! 😉
Update on 30 March 2014:
Not one to be beaten, I have attempted to bake this no knead bread again! Taking tips from SurpriseSaffron and making some slight adjustments to the ingredients, I have successfully baked a decent ‘No Knead’ Loaf!
No Knead Loaf
tea and sesame 
How interesting! I’ll keep this and your tips in mind if I ever end up in the same situation with my breadmaker. I’ve forgotten to put the kneading tool in before and ended up throwing away all of the ingredients, maybe I should have experimented?
Yes, you must Elaine! I hate to waste food, so I’m always trying to find alternative ways to use left overs… but not always successfully! 😉
😀 x
Looks delicious – love the seeds on top!
Thanks, I’ll need to try a different recipe next time though… The flavor wasn’t great
Bread always makes my mouth water – and this looks delicious! I hope to be brave enough to cook my own someday, but I think I’ll start with my mother because she is much more experienced at the whole gluten-free baking thing!
Gluten free baking interests me quite a lot but I need to get to grips with easy baking first! Lol
All you count makes sense Sam Sin and also I think maybe you can reduce the oven heat and bake it longer will help because it’s big loaf or you can flatten the dough in a pan or make 4-5 small rounds that way maybe it will help to prevent the mushiness in the center while the time baking time will be reduced as well but as you said if the taste was not okay then also the ingredients might be changed. But overall it looks very yummy.
Thanks for your reassurance and advice! I’ll give it another try and make some smaller rolls… 🙂
You are very welcome it’s our pleasure we hope it will work :))