Overnight No Knead Bread | with commercial yeast

Name: Overnight No Knead Bread | with commercial yeast
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 45 min
Total time: 735 min
Ingredients: 700 g all purpose flour; 455 g room temp water; 20 g salt; 1/4 tsp dry yeast

43 Comments / Bread & Co, Recipes / By Andra

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This is a recipe for absolute beginners, and/or for people that don’t want to get into the trouble of making and then feeding a sourdough starter, and rather prefer using commercial yeast. It requires minimal effort, and no special equipment other than a cast iron pot with a lid, aka Dutch oven.

I developed this recipe because I noticed people are afraid of getting into the sourdough starter “business”. Although I rather recommend a sourdough bread, for its flavor and its long shelf life, I understand that not everybody has the time or interest to be taking care of a living being.

So for this recipe you will only need flour, dry yeast, salt and water. You will start the mixing of the dough in the evening before the baking day, stretch and fold the dough 2 times (no need for kneading), and leave it to proof overnight. Next day you shape it, let it rise in a basket and then bake it.

Flour

I chose all purpose flour for this recipe, because I suppose it is what any household has. If you want to use another one, like bread flour, you might need to add a little more water.

Anyways, in general, all flours need more or less flour than others, it depends how dry it is, where you store it, what type of wheat, etc. But you can start with this recipe and then experiment in the following trials with more water if you want it more moist, or less water if you think it was too hard to work with it because it would not want to stay in place.

But I must warn you, the more water you add, the more difficult it will be to shape it in the final phase. This recipe has a 65% hydration. That means, for every 100 g of flour, I added 65 g of water. I think it is an easy to work with hydration for a beginner, without the bread being too dry.

The recipe calls for 700 g of flour and 455 g of water. If for example you want to change the hydration to 70%, for the 700g of flour you will have to add 700g * 0,70 = 490g of water.

Yeast

I used active dry yeast, that you can mix it directly with your flour. If the instruction on the packages tell you to activate it in some water before, do that. The recipe calls for 1/4 tea spoon of yeast. I doubled it because I had around 16-17°C in my kitchen and I did not want to wait too long in the morning for the dough to rise. If you have an usual home temperature of 24°C, use the quantity from the recipe.

Water

If your tap water has a lot of chlorine, use filtered water. Here in Germany, in the area where I live, the water is really good, and does not smell or taste la chlorine, so I can use directly tap water for the bread. But too much chlorine can kill the yeast, so better use filtered water.

The temperature of the water should be room temperature. If you use colder, it will slow the fermentation, if you use warm (around 40 °C), it will ferment faster. Be aware that the taste wins a lot in case of longer fermentations. After the 2 stretch and fold that you will do, you can even pop the dough in the fridge and leave it for more time than just overnight. You will have to check though if you have to leave it more on the counter then, for it to rise to a doubled volume.

Salt

I used pink salt, but use whichever you have at hand. Be aware though, that table salt will make the dough saltier if you use the same amount. So you might have to use less. Salt is important not just for taste, but also for the texture of the dough, it makes it tighter and more elastic. But if you don’t want to use salt at all, it is also ok.

Baking

I recommend a Dutch oven for the baking of the bread. It creates something like a mini oven inside the oven, where the moisture of the bread is trapped inside because of the heavy lid and helps the bread have more oven spring, it rises more, before the crust gets settled. For the browning, later we just remove the lid and allow the crust to get to harden and acquire taste and crunchiness.

Professional ovens can inject steam while baking, but since we do not have such fancy ovens in our homes, we can use this solution of a Dutch oven. It is a very useful tool in the kitchen, I cook all the time in it, making soups, stews, frying things, and of course bread baking.

Ok, I hope I explained decently what is think is important for making this bread. If you do decide to make sourdough bread, take a look at my recipe here.

If you have any questions, write them in the comment section bellow and I will try to answer if I know.