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Homemade white no-knead sandwich bread
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No-Knead White Sandwich Loaf

Servings: 2 2-lb loaves
Author: Zoë François

Equipment

Ingredients

  • 3 cups (680g) lukewarm water 100℉ or below
  • 1 Tbsp (10g) granulated yeast*
  • 1 Tbsp (10g) kosher salt
  • 1/3 cup (85g) granulated sugar**
  • 1/4 cup (58g) oil
  • 7 1/2 cups (1,065g) all-purpose flour***
  • Butter for greasing the loaf pan
  • Egg wash (1 beaten egg + 1 Tbsp. water) for brushing the loaf

Instructions

Mixing the Dough

  • Mix the yeast, salt, sugar, and oil with the water in a 6-quart, lidded (not airtight) container or a 5-quart stand mixer bowl.
  • Mix in the flour—kneading is unnecessary: Add all of the flour at once.
    Mix with a Danish dough whisk, a wooden spoon or a heavy-duty stand mixer (with paddle) until the mixture is uniform.
    Pro Tip: If you're hand-mixing and it becomes too difficult to incorporate all the flour with the spoon, you can reach into your mixing vessel with wet hands and press the mixture together. Don't knead! It isn't necessary. You're finished when everything is uniformly wet, without dry patches. This step is done in a matter of minutes, and will yield a dough that is fairly tacky.

Allow to Rise

  • Cover with a lid that fits the container well but isn't completely airtight.
    Pro Tip: If you're using a bowl, cover loosely with plastic wrap. Towels don't work—they stick to wet dough. Lidded (or even vented) plastic buckets are readily available.
    Allow the mixture to rise at room temperature for about 2 hours, depending on the room's temperature and the initial water temperature—then refrigerate it and use for up to 7 days.
    Pro Tip: If your container isn't vented, allow gases to escape by leaving it open a crack for the first couple of days in the fridge. After that you can usually close it, but a vented container is best.
    You can use a portion of the dough any time after the 2-hour rise.
    Pro Tip: Fully refrigerated dough is less sticky and is easier to work with than dough at room temperature, so the first time you try this method, it is best to refrigerate the dough overnight (or at least 3 hours) before shaping a loaf.
    Once refrigerated, the dough will seem to have shrunk back upon itself and it will never rise again in the bucket—that's normal. No need to punch down this dough!

Baking Day

  • Grease an 8 1/2- × 4 1/2-inch nonstick loaf pan (or a small Pullman pan) with butter (grease heavily if you are not using a nonstick pan).
    Dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and, using kitchen shears or a serrated knife, cut off a 2-pound (cantaloupe-size) piece. Dust with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball (form a gluten cloak, see notes) by stretching the surface of the dough around to the bottom, rotating the ball a quarter-turn as you go.
  • Pro Tip: Most of the dusting flour will fall off; it's not intended to be incorporated into the dough. The bottom of the loaf may appear to be a collection of bunched ends, but it will flatten out and adhere during resting and baking. The correctly shaped loaf will be smooth and cohesive. The entire process should take no more than 20 to 40 seconds.
  • Elongate the ball into an oval and drop it, seam side down, into the prepared pan.
  • Cover loosely with plastic wrap and allow to rest at room temperature for 90 minutes.
    Pro Tip: You may not see much rise during this period, but more rising will occur during baking (oven spring). If you are using fresh dough, that has not been refrigerated, you only have to let it rest for 45 minutes.
  • Preheat the oven to 350°F, with a rack placed in the center of the oven.
  • Brush the top of the loaf with egg wash.
  • Bake for about 50 minutes, or until medium golden brown and well set.
    Pro Tip: If you are testing the baked bread with an instant read thermometer, it will be about 205°F. (White bread will not form a hard, crackling crust.)
    Remove from pan.
    Pro Tip: If the loaf sticks, wait 10 minutes and it will steam itself out of the pan. Allow to cool completely about 2 hours, preferably on a wire cooling rack, for best flavor, texture, and slicing. Cutting into a hot loaf is tempting, but it won't slice well and may seem underbaked if you break into it before it's cooled.
  • Store the remaining dough in the refrigerator in your lidded or loosely plastic-wrapped container and use it over the next 4 days.
    Pro Tip: Freezing. The dough can also be frozen in 2-pound portions in an airtight container for about 3 weeks and defrosted in the refrigerator before use.

Notes

*You can use instant, active dry or platinum yeast (which has dough enhancers). 
**You can substitute the sugar with honey or maple syrup. 
***If you measure with cups, use the scoop-and-sweep method (see notes).
THE SCOOP-AND-SWEEP METHOD: It's easier to scoop and sweep if you store your flour in a bin rather than the bag it's sold in; it can be hard to get the measuring cups into the bag without making a mess. Gently scoop up the flour with the dry measuring cup, then sweep the top level with a knife or spatula; don't press down into the flour as you scoop or you'11 throw off the measurement by compressing. Don't use an extra-large 2-cup-capacity measuring cup, which allows the flour to overpack and measures too much flour.
WEIGHING YOUR INGREDIENTS: I include weight equivalents for all my recipes, because many people find it easier to weigh ingredients than to use cup measures. Use a digital scale—they're becoming less expensive all the time. Simply press the "tare" (zeroing) button before adding an ingredient, and then "tare" again to add the next ingredient.
WHAT'S A "GLUTEN CLOAK"* Just imagine a warm blanket being pulled around you on a cold night. Or, for the more technically inclined: what you are trying to do here is to add enough flour to the surface so it can be handled and the protein strands in the surface can be aligned, creating a resilient "cloak" around the mass of wet dough. Visualize a cloak being pulled around the dough, so that the entire ball is surrounded by a skin. Creating this cloak will create a uniform ball and will help the dough from spreading while it rests.
A version of this recipe appears in Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Zoë François and Jeff Hertzberg.