5-Ingredient Artisanal Bread Recipe for Beginners

Hi Bold Bakers! I'm a huge fan of no-knead doughs. No-knead doughs are doughs that you do not need a mixer to make them, you just mix them up by hand and you ferment the dough overnight. They're really simple to make, almost like a sourdough in their characteristics. Now I've had huge demand for showing you how to make a whole wheat no-knead dough so I'm excited to share that recipe with you today. I also want you to stay tuned to the end of this video where I'm going to share with you lots more no-knead recipes. But right now we're going to get stuck into our dough. First things first, start out in a nice large bowl, you want it to be big because we're going to ferment our dough in here overnight and it needs room to grow. So a nice big bowl is what you need. Into this I'm going to add in some all purpose white flour, and then our whole wheat flour. Now whole grains are really good for us, full of nutrients, fiber, all that good stuff. However I never use 100% whole wheat flour, I always cut it with a little bit of white flour. If you use 100% whole wheat flour, your bread will end up being really heavy. So if you do a good mix of maybe 2 thirds white and 1 third whole wheat, you'll have a lovely light fluffy bread. So our next ingredient, very important, is yeast. Now I use instant yeast, that can be added straight into your dry ingredients. You can also use an active dry yeast, but that will have to be activated in water. I like to use instant because it's just kind of easier. So I'm going to add that into one side of the bowl, and then on the other side of the And then I just want to give these ingredients a quick mix together. Lovely, so these are our dry ingredients, that's all you need. I'm going to set it over to the side and we're going to mix together our wet ingredients. So into my separate jug I'm going to add in some water. I like to use room temperature, blood temperature water so it's not too cold. Yeast loves a nice little bit of warm water. And then we're going to add in our sugar, which is honey in this case. Yeast also needs honey to be able to grow and thrive, so we add that in there. Then just give those a mix together, just so the honey's all mixed in there. Then we're going to take this and add around 2 thirds of it into our dough. Now we don't add in all the liquid and I'll show you why. I'm going to take a spatula and just start to mix our liquid together. So now the reason I don't add in all the water at once, and I do this with all my bread doughs, is because you don't always need all the water, or maybe you need a little bit more. So what you do is pour the majority of it in, give your bread a mix, see then if you need the extra water and then add it in. The thing about it is that once it's in there you can't take it out and we don't want to end up with a soggy dough. What we're looking for is for our dough to form a ball and to clean the bowl. To hydrate all of the flour, but I don't want a soggy dough because soggy dough can be quite difficult to work with. I'm going to keep on mixing until we form our dough. Now you might need even more water than what's written in the recipe, that's totally normal, there's nothing wrong with that. So that's all the mixing our dough needs, what we want to do now is cover it in some cling wrap, so the air doesn't get at it, and then we're going to put over a tea towel and keep it nice and warm. Now what we have to do is wait, really simple, nothing else, we're going to wait for around 18-24 hours, and what's going to happen during this time is that your dough ferments. Just like a sourdough would, it builds flavor, texture, it gets that almost kind of sour saltiness to it and it gets really lovely and bubbly and gassy. So this is a really exciting part, it's actually one of my favorite parts. So we're just going to set this aside, 18-24 hours, no less than that, and then we're going to come back and see how it's doing. So here's the dough I prepared earlier, I made it yesterday and it's been fermenting for over 20 hours, so I want to show you what you're looking for with your fermented dough. So as you can see it's doubled, maybe if not more in size, it's really spread out, and it's really bubbly, which is lovely because that means it's full of gas and it's happy. Also you'll notice one thing, the smell. Now I want to tell you something, this smell is not a bad smell, it's actually a really great smell. That smell is flavor, and it's really going to make a difference to your bread. Sometimes people say I made a dough and then 2 days later I didn't use it and it started to smell, and they think it's bad and they throw it out, it's not. That's just flavor building up, so don't be afraid of that, it's still perfectly fine. So next what I'm going to do is just flour my surface, and then turn out my dough. You can see all those bubbles, it's absolutely gorgeous, I'm excited about this. So now what you want to do is just knock out the air with your hands. Now when I was a novice baker I thought by doing this you were getting rid of all those lovely bubbles you created, however the opposite is true. By knocking back the dough and getting rid of all those gases, you're actually strengthening the gluten for even bigger and better bubbles to come back. So don't worry about that at all, you're just making it stronger. So the air is knocked out, now we're just going to fold it over itself a little bit, like I said, to make it stronger and strengthen it, and then we're just going to form it into a nice big round ball, or what we call in the biz, a boule. So where do we go from here? Well you can always just traditionally like you would normally do, put it onto a baking tray, cover it with cling wrap and a tea towel and let it proof, or I'm going to show you my secret. So here I have a bread basket, that's pretty much what it is. I do not buy the proofing baskets that are like $50, this is a bread basket for $1. You can also use a hanging basket which I've done before that you can get in gardening stores, or you can even just use a bowl, a regular sized bowl, but I like to proof my bread in these just to give it a really lovely shape. So what I do is I have my basket, and then I get a nice clean tea towel, then I generously dust it with flour, you want to do this because this is going to end up on the outside of your bread, so be generous. And then what we're going to do is take our dough, like this, seam side facing up, the smooth side facing down, and gently place it into your tea towel. As you can see the seams are facing me, this is what we want. Now what I'm going to do is just fold over the tea towel, keep the air off your dough, keep it nice and protected. So the reason I proof mine in a basket or in a bowl at home if you want is because it just gives it a lovely shape and with the tea towel it kind of gets texture off the tea towel and it makes it look really artisanal so it's a beautiful loaf at the end. So now what we're going to do is just set him over to the side at room temperature, nice and warm, not too hot, for around 45 minutes to maybe an hour and 15 minutes or even an hour and a half. What we want it to do is double in size, let it get nice and big and then it's ready to go into the oven. So my bread's been proofing for a little over an hour, let's have a sneaky peek. Now I want to show you what to look for so you know when it's ready and when it's been proofed. So what you do is you push down and if your bread kind of bounces back really quickly that means it needs longer to proof so set it over to the side again, give it 15 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it is, longer, and what you're going for is really when you push it down and it slowly bounces back, that's when it's proofed enough. And I'm pushing mine there now and I can see that it is ready. Like I said you might need a little bit more time, you might need less time, in Santa Monica it's lovely and warm here, so mine went nice and fast. So all that's left to do now is turn this out onto our tray. So I'm just going to bring in my baking sheet dusted with flour, and then all you want to do is just turn out your dough very gently onto your tray. Now it's a nice round size, it's looking really good, this is a happy dough I can tell. So before your loaf goes into the oven you have to do one more thing, give it a beautiful score on top. So you can do this with a very sharp knife or you can get one of these little guys that I got online for like 12 bucks, I can put a link on my website. And then just go over it, whatever design you want, nice and fast, you don't have to do it too deep. There we go, beautiful. So now our bread after all that is ready to go into the oven. So bread loves a hot oven, bake it off at 400°F or 200°C for roughly 50-60 minutes or until it's lovely golden brown on the outside. So you've probably noticed a few different things in my oven, I slid my bread onto a cast iron preheated tray, also below that was a little baking tray with some boiling water to create steam. Now I did a video recently on the 7 most common bread making mistakes and I covered all of this, so you're definitely going to want to watch that video before you start making your bread. And it just means that you will have beautiful, crispy, crusty bread at the end of it all. I could not be happier with how this turned out. So come here to me, I want to show you exactly what we're looking for here. So as you can see I got a nice golden brown, you definitely do want that because it gives you a crisper crust and it also gives you more flavor. So get a nice golden brown color, and then a nice score on top. This looks absolutely gorgeous. Now in case you're worried is your bread done or not, a good way to tell is to turn it over, give it a tap on the bottom and if it sounds hollow like this one does, that means you're good to go. I love every process of bread making but I have to say slicing into it is probably my favorite part because you never know what you're gonna get on the inside. You're just hoping it's gonna be lovely. Look at that. Oh man, beautiful. I am thrilled. Just like I said to you, no knead doughs or fermented doughs are like sour doughs. You get these lovely big bubbles on the inside and you get that kind of sour smell. Also this is full of whole wheat and you can see that, you can smell it, you're gonna be able to taste it. The texture of this is exactly what I was going for. Absolutely gorgeous. I'm gonna cut myself a little piece, oh my gosh, it's gorgeous. It has a lovely thick crust, it's a little bit chewy, and the crumb is just beautiful. It's bubbly, it's airy. So I just fermented this dough for 24 hours, but you can put it into the fridge and ferment for even 3-4 days longer and the flavor and texture will just get better and better and much deeper. I really hope you liked this, go check out that video I told you about the 7 most common bread making mistakes and then also I've got tons more no knead doughs from cinnamon rolls to brioche to sweet and savory, you're not going to want to miss those so keep on watching.