Flour. Yeast. Water. Salt. These are the ingredients that real bread is made from. A drizzle of olive oil if you’re making pizza, perhaps, a handful of oats or wheatgerm for flavour, nuts and seeds or dried fruit for texture. Real bread goes from oven to table in minutes. It starts life on the kitchen counter, serves several meals then is either eaten or repurposed to thicken soup, as crumbs to coat fish, or crusts saved in the freezer. Real bread doesn’t sit on a shelf for a week, stuffed with synthetic fats, stabilisers and mould inhibitors to allow it to do so. It doesn’t live as long again in your kitchen, sliced and stodgy and sweating slightly in its plastic wrapper . 

Real bread is something I’m pretty passionate about – it’s the reason I started this blog in the first place – so when Le Pain Quotidien invited me to take part in their latest campaign, I had to sign up.  Le Pain might not be the first to champion the important cause of real bread, and I certainly hope they won’t be the last, but this stuff is so important it bears repeating. In an age where we’re utterly obsessed with what goes into our bodies, bread has gone from everyday staple to the subject of extreme controversy. On the one hand we have double digit priced artisan sourdough, people queuing out the doors to grab a slice they can smear with insta-worthy avocado,; on the other the pappy sliced stuff piled high in supermarkets, little to differentiate between the packets other than a good marketing campaign and some added nutrients to replace the ones the manufacturing process has stripped away. People avoid bread baskets like the plague, complain of bloating and equate gluten-free diets with health, but what is the truth about bread?

As with so many questions in life, the answer isn’t revolutionary. Unless you’re gluten intolerant (and I mean properly intolerant, not just that you feel borderline comatose after eating an entire 20 inch pizza to yourself, as even the best of us might), eating a little bread isn’t going to do you any harm. In fact, a new study in the British Journal of Nutrition found no differences in stomach emptying time, gut symptoms, bowel water content or gas when healthy adults ate gluten-free bread versus regular bread. What could make a difference, however, is eating real bread made with just flour, yeast, water and salt. Not necessarily the insanely priced artisan stuff, but bread made at home in the good, old-fashioned way. In contrast to commercially made bread, pumped full of air and artificial ingredients, it’s a great source of carbs, our bodies’ preferred source of fuel, is fun to make and tastes damn delicious to boot.

The recipe I’m posting today is a no-knead loaf of bread. Just four ingredients and absolutely no shaping or kneading skills and you can achieve this beautiful loaf: slightly sour and chewy in the middle with a crisp crust and the kind of air pockets you’d see in your local fancy bakery for five times the price. The secret to this recipe is time, and although you might groan at the fact this takes over a day to bake, I promise your hands on involvement will be less than half an hour. Mix the ingredients as you’re making dinner, pop it in the oven the following night and you’ll have a beautiful fresh loaf on the table for the following morning. Four ingredients. A little patience. A very lovely loaf.