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My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method Hardcover – Illustrated, October 5, 2009
| Jim Lahey (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Jim Lahey’s "breathtaking, miraculous, no-work, no-knead bread" (Vogue) has revolutionized the food world.
When he wrote about Jim Lahey’s bread in the New York Times, Mark Bittman’s excitement was palpable: “The loaf is incredible, a fine-bakery quality, European-style boule that is produced more easily than by any other technique I’ve used, and it will blow your mind.” Here, thanks to Jim Lahey, New York’s premier baker, is a way to make bread at home that doesn’t rely on a fancy bread machine or complicated kneading techniques.
The secret to Jim Lahey’s bread is slow-rise fermentation. As Jim shows in My Bread, with step-by-step instructions followed by step-by-step pictures, the amount of labor you put in amounts to 5 minutes: mix water, flour, yeast, and salt, and then let time work its magic―no kneading necessary. The process couldn’t be more simple, or the results more inspiring. Here―finally―Jim Lahey gives us a cookbook that enables us to fit quality bread into our lives at home.
color photos throughout- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateOctober 5, 2009
- Dimensions8.4 x 0.9 x 10.4 inches
- ISBN-100393066304
- ISBN-13978-0393066302
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Review
― Mark Bittman, New York Times
"Jim Lahey's My Bread expands on his no-knead, bread-in-a-pot method, a revolutionary development that allows even once-hopeless bakers like me to produce wonderful loaves of thick-crusted goodness. In the professional arena, Jim is the acknowledged master of bread, dough, and crust. Chefs, foodies, and food nerds flock to his bakery and to his pizza joint. He is to bread what the Dalai Lama is to Buddhism."
― Anthony Bourdain
"The secret to making a foolproof, nearly labor-free loaf that tastes as delicious as anything from a baker…[Lahey] is the most intuitive bread baker I have ever met."
― Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue
"Jim Lahey…opened the Sullivan St Bakery in 1994 selling breads that no one in the city had made before…Sullivan St became the name to look and ask for, and…became…the place to go for the incredibly airy, oil-brushed, lightly salted pizza Bianca, which is even better than that of the bakery in Rome's Campo de' Fiori."
― Corby Kummer, The Atlantic
"It's bread above all that [Lahey] knows and loves…The man can do wonders with flour and water, massaged or not…He can do fluffy, crunchy, supple, dense. He can do pizza Bianca―man, oh man, can he do pizza Bianca―those salty squares of almost entirely naked crust."
― Frank Bruni, New York Times
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Rick Flaste served as the editor of the New York Times Dining Section at its inception, creating many of its acclaimed features. He has collaborated on numerous cookbooks and books.
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company (October 5, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393066304
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393066302
- Item Weight : 2.07 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.4 x 0.9 x 10.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #44,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #83 in Bread Baking (Books)
- #316 in Celebrity & TV Show Cookbooks
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Jim Lahey has been featured on the cover of Bon Appétit and in The New York Times, Vogue and Saveur. He has also appeared on the Martha Stewart Show and NBC's Today show. His innovative no-knead bread recipe that ignited a worldwide home-baking revolution was first published in an article by Mark Bittman in The New York Times in 2006. This article became the basis of Lahey's first cookbook My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, and now his just-released, My Pizza: The Easy No-Knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home.
Lahey opened Sullivan St Bakery in Soho in 1994 with little more than the wild yeast he hand-cultivated in Italy and a desire to bring the craft of small-batch bread baking to America. In 2009, he opened the doors to Co., his first pizza restaurant.
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I've baked the basic starter recipe, using a scale to weigh my flour as suggested (I'd bought one years ago and never used it). I bought a 5 qt.
glass Pyrex bowl, the cast iron dutch oven, and that was my investment. I had flour and yeast already. Flour, salt, yeast, cool water. I turn my oven on about 400* for a warm surface (I have my thermostat set on 68*, so is a bit cool for the 12-18 hour first rise) till the preheat buzzer goes off. I put saran wrap over my mixed bowl of ingredients, put it on top of my stovetop, and go off to bed or out for the day. I usually give it the 18 hours to rise because I've got a lot to do. The dough rises, is bubbly. I scrape the bowl onto a floured cookie sheet (makes cleanup a breeze), use my spatula or hands to fold the edges up and make a circle, dust a clean old cotton dish towel with flour, gently lift the dough and plop it onto the towel, dust the top with some cornmeal, fold the towel over the dough and put it back on the warm stove top to rise for about 2 hours. After the given time, a half hour before ready to bake, I heat the over to 425* and put my cast iron pan in the oven to get hot. The cast iron is heavy, but I read some iffy reviews on the Emile Henry baker preferred by Jim, and cast iron lasts forever. When it's time, I carefully put the dough into the hot Dutch oven, put the hot lid on top, and slide this into the oven to bake. So easy! My husband came over for dinner the other night, and raved about the quality of this bread. I'm prepping a loaf of the olive bread today - it rose better than my first loaf due to the learning curve about the needed warmth - and I can tell it's going to taste amazing.
It may sound like hype, but this way of making bread truly is revolutionary, and for the bread-challenged people like me, we finally have a method to make absolutely kudo-worthy Italian art bread, pizza, etc. The pictures are terrific, the book is well-written, and best of all, living in Philly now, I can make the drive to NYC and visit The Seventh Street Bakery in person to say thanks to Jim Lahey for writing such a rich, gentle, fierce book on the art of baking bread.
My first impression is very positive (I don't expect it to change). The book is printed in convenient 10x8" format on a high-quality glossy paper. Most but not all recipes are accompanied by photos, which make the process very clear. The recipes are given in cups and in metric units, a good thing in my opinion, but if you're used to ounces, you're a bit out luck, although quite a few recipes start with 280 g. of flour which is pretty much 10 oz. The layout is very clear, typeface makes it easy to read, there are no gaudy colors, and every recipe can be found in the table of contents.
There are six chapters. First comes highly personal, rather entertaining and mercifully short explanation of how Mr. Lahey became a baker and what bread represents to him. Second chapter is theory, it explains what the ingredients are, and how the process works. Third chapter is where the recipes begin, there's no-knead-bread itself and about dozen of breads based on it as well as some breads based on liquids other than water. Fourth chapter is pizza and focaccia. Brace yourself, you won't find much tomato sauce there and even less cheese. Fifth chapter is called "The Art of the Sandwich" and describes about a score of paninis and gives recipes for most ingredients that go into them - roasts, spreads, marinated vegetables, dressings, they are all there. The last chapter deals with the things you can do with the stale bread.
Sadly there're no sourdough recipes, and many Sullivan Street Bakery staple breads are not in the book, but then again it is not called "Sullivan Street Bakery Bread Book", so I can't fault the author for not including them, no matter how much I'd like them to be there.
So all in all it's an excellent book and highly recommend it. Seasoned baker or beginner, no matter, you will find something there that will make it worth the purchase. And mark my word, in a couple of months everyone and his uncle will have blogged about stecca.
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However, I feel slightly ripped-off because the £20, 223 page book contains about 70 pages of relevant images and recipes. The remainder is repeats of the basic process. Followed by a 60 page section on making sandwiches, bread crumbs and using stale bread. Plus loads of white space and images. I think £12.50 would be a more reasonable price.
As for the actual recipes, they aren't greatly changed from the first basic loaf but then that is the nature of baking. I'm glad I have bought to book and will use some of the ideas but think it is over-priced.
He has split the book into 6 chapters, each one on a different subject. Chapter 1 is a kind of bread making autobiography explaining how he got into making bread (to impress a girl!) and his visits to Italy to sample Italian bread baking.
Chapter 2 introduces his no-knead recipe and chapter 3 then builds on this with variations such as rye, olive, Irish and Apple versions amongst others. He also includes some recipes for traditional Italian breads such as Stecca (thin Italian baguettes), Stirato (larger Italian baguettes) and Ciabata (slipper loaf). These are all based on his no-knead method and I am pleased to report they involve no kneading whatsoever!
Chapter 4 is his pizza and focaccia sections. He gives a recipe for his pizza dough (which differs slightly from his bread recipe) and then recipes for lots of different pizza toppings and variations. His Pizza Bianca - kind of like a cross between focaccia and pizza - looks lovely and I shall be trying this one soon.
Chapter 5 is all about sandwiches, which initially struck me as odd and perhaps a bit of a filler but the chapter does make sense. This is an American book by a New Yorker and New Yorkers like nothing better than to go to a deli for a sandwich. So this chapter gives recipes for both sandwich fillings - eg roast beef, roast pork, aioli (garlic mayo), pickles etc - and also the best sandwich combos. I will also be trying these out too.
Finally chapter 6 deals with recipes to use up your left over bread. Again, on first inspection this seemed like a filler section but this has lots of lovely looking recipes in it too; I am looking forward to trying the chocolate torte made using no-knead breadcrumbs!
As I only had the book for about a week I have only had time to make one of the recipes so far - the Stirato. This recipe does involve slightly more work than the basic no-knead bread recipe I've been using this past year before I bought the book but the finished sticks are just as delicious as the bread was! I look forward to trying more of the recipes soon.
So overall, this is a great book full of interesting recipes and is a good read in its own right. It also features some excellent photography. The photos are either presented in a step-by-step fashion so you can see exactly what you need to do (and what the dough / bread should look like) at every stage or they are simply stunning photos of the finished breads themselves. I would wholly recommend this book to anyone interested in baking your own artisan bread that tastes as good as it looks.
When I tried out the basic recipe from this book, the bread came out looking and tasting almost like a sourdough bread. The book has many photo illustrations which I found very helpful. The other recipes in the book are very interesting and I can't wait to try them all out! Definitely will recommend this to other bread bakers.
Having tried unsuccessfully to make bread in the traditional way, (loaves always seemed to turn out like bricks), I was overwhelmed with the fantastic results from this no-knead method. It's extremely easy and the bread is superb - delicious chewy crust and a wonderful light and open crumb. It's hard to believe such an easy recipe can produce such a fantastic loaf. Don't worry if you don't have an iron pot in which to cook the bread - I use a glass pyrex casserole with a lid, and it works perfectly.
This book is a must for anyone who has been put off making bread. Buy it and see for yourself how easy it can be.




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