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No-knead bread pioneer Jim Lahey of NYC’s Sullivan Street Bakery shows us how to develop flavours and texture in homemade bread Laura Brehaut

Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread technique is legendary for good reason. It produces fantastic bread with minimal effort: no special equipment, ingredients or methods necessary. Flour, salt, yeast, water, wheat bran and time are all that’s needed for amateur bakers to achieve artisanal loaves at home.

More than a decade has passed since Lahey first showed journalist Mark Bittman how to make the revolutionary no-knead loaf at his Sullivan Street Bakery in New York City. Since 2006, it has inspired legions of home bakers, food bloggers and authors, and spawned countless imitations (there are nearly 5,000 no-knead bread recipes on allrecipes.com alone).

“I did expect it to have that impact. I really did. I thought it was significant,” Lahey says. “I did not expect that I would be plagiarized or … that the concept would be so imitated and then rolled out.”

In his third book, The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook, Lahey builds on the no-knead bread-making he’s renowned for, and shares his methods for developing flavours and texture using sourdough starters (natural leavening).

“I think that part of the reason for my (no-knead technique’s) success is that it became a gateway experience for people to learn about how important fermentation is for making bread that’s pleasurable to eat,” he says.

“And if people start making great loaves of bread at home – even better than what they would normally get from a store – that in turn will force professional bakers to up their game, which at the end of the day can’t be a bad thing.”