Most of us bakers have had bad bread experiences.  You know what I’m talking about. Hours of rising and kneading and rising and shaping and baking with the end result a loaf of “bread” that has the texture of a brick.

A few years ago, I discovered this no knead crusty artisan bread recipe from Chef-In-Training, and it has been a total bread game changer.  GONE are my days of picking up a loaf of french bread at a bakery to go with dinner on a soup night.  I only serve this bread now.  For two reason: It is insanely delicious and it requires about two minutes of effort on my part to make.  Third reason: It’s incredibly cheap to make, which totally rings my frugal bell.

To make this bread, the only tool you  need is a dutch oven or a heavy, oven safe pot with a lid.  Before I owned a dutch oven, I used to use a Corningware casserole dish with a lid.  Whatever you have will work.  You literally mix together 4 ingredients and let them sit overnight in a bowl.  The next evening, you dump the mixture out onto a floured surface, shape it, and bake it.  That’s it.

The most delicious bread you’ll ever eat.

Enjoy.

• 3 cups All Purpose Flour
• 2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. yeast
• 1½ cups luke-warm water

Instructions:

1. Combine the flour, salt, and yeast in a large bowl then pour in the luke-warm water. Stir until completely combined. Dough will look messy and not smooth, it will throw you off, but it’s supposed to look like this:  
2. Once combined, cover tightly with plastic wrap and let sit on the counter overnight.  Seriously stick it somewhere on your counter and completely forget about it until dinnertime tomorrow.  Let it rise anywhere from 12-18 hours.
3. When it’s done rising, dough will be puffed up appear bubbly and be sticky. It will look like a big pile of bubbly goo.  Like this:
4. When dough is done rising and ready to bake, preheat oven to 450 degrees F.
5. Heavily flour clean counter top or surface. Turn dough onto floured surface.  It will look like this:
6. Shape into a round ball on the heavily floured surface, incorporating some of the flour until your ball is no longer super sticky. Cover lightly with plastic wrap (you can just lay the plastic wrap that you used to cover your large bowl over the top) and let dough rest.
7. While the dough is resting, place your dutch oven into the oven for 30 minutes to pre-heat.
8. After dutch oven has preheated, place ball of dough in the cents of the dutch oven and cover with lid. You can put a piece of parchment under it if your dutch oven doesn’t have an enamel coating.
9. Note handles will be extremely HOT! Use your hot pads!
10. Bake at 450 degrees F for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove lid and bake for an additional 15 minutes until done. Bread will be golden in color.