Easy No Knead Artisan Bread

Say you're in a situation where you have no electricity and you want to make bread.  Well, first you'll need to manually grind your wheat, then mix it all up, knead it by hand, (have you kneaded bread for 15 minutes?....not the easiest job) let rise, and then bake the bread over the fire, in a Volcano stove, or in a Sun Oven.  This is quite labor intensive! Kneading alone would have me making flatbread a couple times a week.  Have you ever tried out your manual wheat grinder?  It takes quite a bit of energy for a small amount of wheat flour. The girls over at foodstoragemadeeasy.net shared a really cool bread recipe.  It makes a loaf of artisan style bread with no grinding of flour, no kneading, and needs no electricity to bake.  I wasn't sure I  believed their claims. So I HAD to try it out!!  

Look what the final product was!! I don't know why I was so shocked that it worked, but I was.  I couldn't believe how easy this was to make.  Here's how I did it.....

First of all I followed the recipe from foodstoragemadeeasy.net exactly as they explained it.  Click HERE to see the recipe.  

The first step takes the longest, but doesn't involve any work on your part.  Crazy, right?!  

 The night before you want your bread baked, you need to mix up the ingredients.  It takes 12-18 hours for the dough to rise.  That's the longest part of this recipe, but it just sits on the counter and does it's thing.  Here's what you do:  stir together 3 cups of white flour, 1/2 t yeast, 1 3/4 t salt, and 1 1/2 cups of cool water.  It should be a sticky clump of dough.  Stir it well and then cover with plastic wrap. 

Then let the dough sit for 12-18 hours to rise.  This picture was taken in the morning after sitting for around 12 hours.  

Once the dough has risen for 12-18 hours turn it out onto a floured surface and let rest, covered, for 30 minutes. You may have to scrape the dough out of the bowl to get it into a ball shape.  I folded the dough into itself a few times to get it to stick into a ball shape. 

 Once it's fully rested, place the dough onto a piece of parchment paper and then into a round Sun Oven pan, that was heating up in the Sun Oven.  You can see my bread baking in the Sun Oven out in my yard.  

After about two hours, I took the lid off of the pan and let the bread "brown" for about a half hour.  I did mist it with water to help it brown a little.  Bread cooked in the Sun Oven doesn't get brown like in a conventional oven.  My oven hovered around 300° the whole baking time.  When the half hour was up, I took the bread out and was a little worried.  It almost looked like it wasn't cooked, but it was, and it did have a slightly hardened crust. 

 

I sliced up the loaf for dinner and was very excited that it worked so well.  It had a definite sourdough taste to it, so be prepared for that.  It isn't a strong sourdough flavor but definitely not a typical white loaf of bread.  It is great to know that even in a stressful, emergency situation that I could make bread for dinner without having to grind flour and then knead it by hand.  Now my next goal is to make this with wheat flour!