Healthy No-knead Bread Recipes

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Making your own bread is very economical. An added benefit: The world’s most heavenly source of home heating this winter will be your oven, cranking out the aroma of freshly baked bread! MARK LUINENBURG

The recipes here are excerpted from the new book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables and Gluten-free Ingredients (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009). This is the much-anticipated sequel to the wildly popular Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking, which taught us how to craft delicious and crusty artisan bread with just a few minutes of work. We brought you that basic technique in our article Five Minutes a Day for Fresh-baked Bread. Now you’ll be able to use the no-knead storage dough method with even healthier recipes. To order either of the fabulous cookbooks (and get a bunch more yummy-but-easy recipes!), visit MOTHER EARTH NEWS Shopping. If you have questions about these recipes, please post them to the comments section at the end of this article, and the baking experts at King Arthur Flour will answer them. 

Here’s the secret to having fresh whole grain breads whenever you want them: Quickly mix enough ingredients for many loaves, then let the dough sit for two hours. Now you can shape and bake a loaf of bread, or you can refrigerate the dough to use over the next couple of weeks. Whenever you want a crusty loaf, just tear off a piece of the dough and shape it into a loaf. Let it rise for 90 minutes, and then bake it. Your house will smell like a bakery, and your family and friends will love you for it.

Only Five Minutes a Day

In writing our first book, we wanted to discard everything that was intimidating about baking, and make the process fast enough to fit into people’s busy lives. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day replaced the time-consuming traditional yeast method with something quicker, without compromising quality. The technique called for mixing large batches of dough in advance, storing them in the refrigerator, and then tearing off dough for loaves as needed over two weeks. Quite a lot of people tried it, and our book became part of a home-baked bread revolution.