I've made America's Test Kitchen's recipe for No-Knead Rustic Loaf twice now and have had the same problem both times. The recipe has many 5-star reviews, and I couldn't find any complaints similar to mine when I searched through the comments. I consider myself a beginner when it comes to bread and made only sandwich loaves up until now. I have read a lot of books on the subject though. I'm just not sure what I'm doing wrong and would really like to make this recipe work!
After the bulk fermentation, the instructions call for 8 folds and then a 15-minute rest. The next step is to shape the dough, but it was still incredibly shaggy and loose. It would not hold any shape and flattened back out immediately. I did my best to shape it into a boule but couldn't create any surface tension. After the second rise, it again looked very bubbly and slack. I baked it anyways and the loaf came out very flat with little, if any, oven spring.
I decided to try the recipe again thinking I might have made a mistake the first time, and I also made a few modifications. I added a series of folds during the bulk fermentation. I folded the dough every 20 minutes for the first hour and then left it alone after that. I also tried pre-shaping the dough into a ball and then adding a 20-minute bench rest before the final shaping. However, the changes I made did not make the dough any easier to work with. It was still a shaggy lump of wet dough with no surface tension and would not hold its shape.
What might be going wrong? I weighed all of my ingredients and followed the instructions exactly, except for the modifications noted the second time I made it. I used King Arthur bread flour and SAF instant yeast (red) from a newly bought package. My kitchen is about 70°F and I kept an eye on the dough while it was rising so I know it didn't over-proof.
Here is the recipe:
Ingredients
- 2 ¾ cups (15 1/8 oz) bread flour
- 1 ½ tsp salt
- ¼ tsp instant yeast
- ¾ cup plus 2 tbsp (7 oz) water, room temperature
- ½ cup mild beer, room temperature
- 1 tbsp distilled white vinegar
Summary of the directions:
make dough Whisk flour, salt, and yeast together in large bowl. Using rubber spatula, fold water, beer, and vinegar into flour mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl and pressing dough until cohesive and shaggy and all flour is incorporated.
first rise Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for at least 8 hours or up to 18 hours.
fold and rest Using greased bowl scraper or your wet fingertips, fold dough over itself by lifting and folding edge of dough toward middle and pressing to seal. Turn bowl 90 degrees and fold dough again; repeat turning bowl and folding dough 6 more times (for a total of 8 folds). Flip dough seam side down in bowl, cover with plastic, and let rest for 15 minutes.
shape dough (standard shaping instructions)
second rise Let rise until doubled in size and springs back minimally when poked gently with your finger, 1 to 2 hours.
bake Reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake loaf in covered pot for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep golden brown and registers at least 205 degrees, 10 to 15 minutes. Using parchment sling, carefully remove loaf from hot pot and transfer to wire rack, discard parchment. Let cool completely, about 3 hours, before slicing.
I don't see anything obvious but dough this wet can be hard to handle. It takes practice. Also, there is nothing that says you can't do more stretch-and-folds in the hopes of tightening up the dough.
If you want to stick with this recipe, I would reduce the amount of liquid until you can work with the dough. Then you can start increasing the liquid little by little.
As for the dough that never shaped up, you can scrape it into a loaf pan and bake it that way. It may not be what you planned for but it will still be good bread.
TomP
It's missing a lot about fermentation - which is a problem - and maybe a hint. Enjoy!
Thanks for your comment! What do you mean that the amounts I quoted are off? I just double checked and the amounts I gave are exactly what is written in the recipe here. Are you saying I'm making an older version of the bread? Also, you mention the dough being overproofed, but I kept an eye on it during both rises and I didn't think it looked that way. I realize I could reduce the liquid like you mentioned, but I know loaves can be made with higher hydration than that and I'd like to learn how to handle the dough. I will give the recipe you linked a try and hopefully have better results. Thanks again!
A good way is to read up on glass bread and make it a few times. After that, you will be able to handle most any wet dough.
At 73% hydration with bread flour the dough should have been soft and sticky but not to the degree you describe. Looking at the comments at the link you gave, I see that someone else had the exact same problem. So somehow there is too much liquid. That might be because of a measurement mistake, very damp flour, flour with different properties, or some other reason. Whatever that reason is, your flour in your kitchen at this time seems to absorb less water than in the original test kitchen.
AdrianeS, I see that we are talking about two different breads and even about two different bread making techniques! It doesn't really matter that much, since we established that your bread dough needs less liquid to control its consistency, gluten formation, and fermentation speed. I hope that you will have success with your new trials, it's a good bread. Maybe exclude beer and simply use water, to see if it was beer that was affecting gluten in your bread dough previously, who knows. My bread dough was on the drier side.
The original version (No-Knead 1.0) that started the trend was by Jim Lahey. His 2006 recipe is for a 85% hydration bread and absolutely no kneading.
No-Knead 1.0, Jim Lahey's bread
Then Kenji Lopez-Alt from ATK came up with their Almost No-Knead Bread where he reduced dough hydration to 68% (No-Knead 2.0). It is made with American All-Purpose flour, preferably Ceresota, which they established as the best for bread APF flour in the US in their series of flour tests. King Arthur APF works great too. In 2012, they switched to cold oven start in this recipe which I find much more convenient (No-Knead 3.0). Kenji's reasoning for stiffer dough and a couple of folds before shaping was explained here. Thus, their no-knead bread does not allow us to practice handling higher hydration dough.
How Water Affects Bread Texture
50 percent hydration: This loaf had the smallest ratio of water to flour, resulting in a weak gluten network. As a result, the loaf was small and dense with a tight crumb.
68 percent hydration: With a typical hydration level of 68 percent, this loaf rose and expanded well, possessing modest-sized holes.
80 percent hydration: This loaf had the greatest ratio of water to flour, causing the gluten network to be weak and diluted. Therefore, the loaf was flat and wide with large air pockets.
My no-knead 2.0, all-purpose flour
My no-knead 3.0, all purpose flour, cold oven start
You attempted to follow the most recent recipe for ATK "New and Improved" No-Knead Rustic bread, developed in 2022, where they decided that 'wetter is better', that APF flour needs fixing, while bread flour needs truly no-kneading, and increased hydration to make a VERY wet dough and used high protein bread flour and the preheated oven method of baking. There is absolutely no kneading, no folding, nothing. It's like going back to Jim Lahey's bread, except that they flavored their loaf with mild lager and acidified it with vinegar. Snapshot from a video on Amazon previewing this bread book:
I have never seen that Rustic bread recipe, published less than a year ago in a book, and that is why I said that in your quoted recipe 'ingredients were off'. In my mind, bread flour is way too high in protein to use in no-knead method (it will give too chewy/rubbery a loaf to my taste) and 82% hydration is way too high for a method where there is no tightening of the dough during fermentation, pre-shaping and shaping. Still, in their book "Everyday Bread' that bread looks sort of normal (image of "No-Knead Dutch Oven Bread" taken from the Amazon page for that book).
I ordered that book today and will bake that Rustic bread soon, to see what gives.
Should you want to learn and practice very wet handling dough techniques with that dough, please, rely on the method of continuous hydration. Mix a medium consistency dough initially, not using all liquid from the recipe. Set the excess of liquid aside. Then, with time ( 1-3 hours later), as gluten forms, you can start adding more and more liquid ingredients to the bread dough, while folding dough and letting it rest in between. Eventually, all liquid in the recipe would be absorbed without damaging gluten and you will have a tall and majestic loaf of bread. The technique of continuous mixing is illustrated in this video.
hi AdrianeS,
as I do the math, using online conversion tools, ¾ cup plus 2 tbsp of water is 208 g, ½ cup of beer is 119 g, a tbsp of vinegar is likely 15g -- which makes your total liquids to be 342 g.
2.75 cups of bread flour is around 350 g.
So, if this is all correct, your hydration is around 97%. This ok for ciabatta & pan de cristal. I've made many a pan de cristal with King Arthur bread flour at 100% hydration. It's a great bread -- but the dough starts out like a puddle and it takes a specific strategy of coil folds over time to have it come together, and the final dough never looks like a traditional loaf does. Also, the recipe generally calls for a total of 5 hours of fermentation -- so depending on whether you kept it on the counter 8 or 18 hours, your dough might indeed be overfermented.
Whatever the recipe you are following may say (I can't see it because I'm not signed up for the site), if you're seeking a normal loaf and not a ciabatta/pan de cristal style bread, it seems you are using too much liquid.
Rob
In doing the online conversions, I noticed that 2 3/4 cups of bread flour is actually 12.3 ounces and not 15.125 as you have it in your original post.
15.125 ounces is about 430 g, so if you weighed that amount of flour and used the amounts of liquid you have in the original post, your hydration would be around 80%, which is totally manageable for a white flour boule. If that's what you did and you still had puddle-dough then something else is going on.
Rob
Here's the problem. The original poster wrote "2 ¾ cups (15 1/8 oz) bread flour". 15 1/8 oz is about 428g of flour, not 350g. Using 428g, the hydration would have been about 73%.
The recipe at the linked page at America's Test Kitchen may have changed a bit: today it calls for
Still the right weight but still the wrong number of cups. KA bread flour is labeled at 30g per 1/4 cup or 120g/cup, so 2.75 cups should be 330g (not 350). The difference between 330g and 428g is large and would have lead to a hydration of about 95%, which seems in line with the described behavior.
As I wrote earlier in the thread:
Now we know it was a recipe error.
Lesson #1 for new bakers: measure bulk items by weight and not volume. Of course, in this case how would a new baker know which to use if the weight and volume disagreed?
Tom