Bread is. 

Hi Elizabeth.

You asked me for a bread recipe. 

This is difficult. 

Bread is a discipline, not a recipe. 

With that said, I am going to do my best to give you a gateway drug. I will give it to you in baker's percentages, and in grams. I will not give it to you in cups - measuring flour by volume is barbaric.

First, some context. I know, I know, you just want the recipe. But bread is patience itself, so bear with me for a minute. 

This recipe and method is intended to improve on and replace the ubiquitous (and good!) easy no-knead recipes floating around - Jim Lahey's is among the best and simplest. Its guiding principles are based on the astonishing ease that Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois introduced to the home baker in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day  (my gateway to baking bread): the pleasing idea that you can make a lot of bread dough, stick it in the fridge, and bake it when you want it. It also builds on what I learned from Anis Bouabsa's radical baguette recipe, as published by Peter Reinhart in The Bread Bakers Apprentice - though I think I've eliminated some wasted moves (I favor a long autolyse at room temperature over a delayed fermentation in the fridge, a higher hydration, and different dough handling...)

Once you've mastered this, we can move on to different ways of getting more flavor out of your dough - like using a sponge, or tackling sourdough. There's a lot of bullshit out there about sourdough mystique. You don't have to treat it like fairy-magic to feel a deep connection to the thousands of years of breadbaking history that you're following, and you don't have to even do that to appreciate the immensely superior flavor. And anyway if you're going to the trouble of learning how to handle dough and manage fermentation, the second step is way easier than the first was. 

I digress. 

The best single book on fundamental techniques of bread baking, full stop, is Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast. You should buy it when you're ready to move past this recipe. It's simple, it's thorough, it's deep. It has a monomaniacal focus is on lean dough: that is, breads made using only those four ingredients. It is painstakingly thorough about technique, equipment, and process. If you want to get more serious about bread than baking once in a while, that is the best single book you can read. Use it for at least 6 months before you think about a new bread book. 

Okay. The recipe. I advise you read it all through a few times before you get cracking. Watch the videos sprinkled throughout; they're good. 

weight:

1,000 g flour
750 g water
20 g salt
2 g yeast

I recommend you start with white flour. King Arthur All Purpose is good. Don't buy bread flour. It's made for a different technique and time-scale than this recipe calls for. 

When you get good at this, you can slowly start adding other grains - whole wheat and rye are the easiest to start with. Spelt is also great. Stuff like oats, corn, buckwheat, and other things might be beyond you until you outgrow this recipe. Start by substituting 100 grams non-white-flour per 1,000. Inch it up as you get more confident, if you want to. 

aM

Mise en Place:

Gather your tools:

• a big bowl
• two little bowls 
• flour
• a biggish pitcher of water (room temperature)
• salt (sea salt is best, but anything not too coarse is fine)
• yeast
• kitchen scale (5kg or even 10kg capacity is nice to have. Don't get anything that isn't accurate to 1g.)
• bench scraper
• dough whisk, if you want it. 
• flexible dough scraper, if you want it.

For later...

• a banneton
• a 5 quart (ish) dutch oven
• dusting flour (1/2 rice flour and 1/2 white is best, but any will do)

pm

mix & ferment

In the evening (about two hours before you go to bed, or more), add the yeast to the dough.

Mix it in thoroughly, by pinching through the dough like a lobster would, rotating the bowl. Then rotate the bowl the other way, pinching crosswise through your first pinches. I do about 16 total. 

Now, grab one piece of the wet mass and fold it over. Rotate and repeat until you've loosely folded the wet, shaggy mass all over. I do about 5 folds. Next, repeat the process with the salt. 

I'm assuming here that your kitchen is a livable temperature. If it's very cold or hot in your kitchen, your time scales will elongate or contract, respectively. Because yeast breeds faster when it's warmer. 

am

dividing 

Now you're going to cut off a hunk of dough to make into a loaf. 

Your dough should be risen significantly, a little shiny, and may have some subtle bubbles under the skin of the dough. It'll smell a little sweet. 

Tip the dough on to the unfloured counter. Dust the top with a little flour. Your flexible dough scraper is good for clearing out your bowl. 

Cut off a hunk of dough with your bench knife. This is your loaf. Make it about half the size of the loaf you want. A large grapefruit size is a good place to start.  Put the rest back in the big bowl and refrigerate it. (We'll circle back to this dough.)

Scrape along the bottom of your dough hunk to loosely organize it into a ball, rotating, scraping, rotating, scraping. Be gentle with the dough. Use a litte flour on your hand to keep it from sticking to you.

Here is a hypnotic video of a man shaping a bunch of dough like this. Watch , learn, be hypnotized. But STOP watching it at 4:55. Because after that, I strongly disagree with his rough handling techniques. 

Let the dough rest for 20 minutes, uncovered, preferably on the side of your working surface, not the center. (The bottom of the dough will make it wet, which will complicate your life in the next step.)

If you're making multiple loaves, it's okay if the bleed together a bit. Cut them apart with your bench scraper if they don't pull apart on their own. 

am or pm: you choose

Proofing

Your loaf is now doing all its own work. This is called the proof. 

You can do two things now. Bake it in an hour, or put it in the fridge and bake it later.

For the one-hour timeline, set it on top of the oven. Wait a half an hour and then preheat your oven, leaving it right where it is. 

For the many-hours timeline, stick it in the fridge. It'll be good in there for about 12 hours. After that it starts to get wet, sticky, and not good for baking. 

Either way, you want the dough, at the end of its proof, to spring back slowly and incompletely when you push your finger one knuckle-depth into the dough.

Dough relaxes as it rises. So: too early and it'll rise unevenly and not have great flavor. Too late and it'll collapse into a wet brick of dough.

Here is a video of a finger ominously poking dough. That dough looks good to me. If you are in doubt, err on the side of too springy.  

EATING

The interior of the loaf is still cooking for a surprisingly long time after it comes out. Let it cool on a rack or tipped on its side at least until it's just warm to the touch before slicing, about an hour. 

Enjoy.