This is the easiest no knead bread recipe I've found. We make this every day in our house but we substitute the dried yeast for 1.5 cups of sourdough starter, so if you have a starter, try it out! This is from my new book Mother's Little Helper. 

Easy Daily Bread

I have made bread for years, and in A Home Companion I gave three of my favourite recipes and received heaps of emails from women who had been converted into bread bakers.

I have since discovered this recipe which only has four ingredients and does not require kneading. All it needs is time, and so I prepare it before I go to bed, let it sit all night and then put it in the oven in time to have fresh bread for lunch. When you take it out of the oven it is crisp and crunchy, just like a loaf of bread you might buy in a French bakery.

Although this is a white bread it has no added fats or sugars which many homemade breads do. And you can make a wholemeal version easily by substituting one cup of the white flour for wholemeal flour. You can use ordinary High Grade flour from your supermarket, but if you can source Italian pizza flour, which will be marked either “00” or “45”, the loaf will be lighter and crunchier. By making this you are getting some basic ingredients without any additives which you might find in commercial bread.

3 cups white flour (for wholemeal use 1 cup wholemeal flour and 2 cups white flour)

¼ tsp granulated yeast

1¼ tsp salt

1½ to 2½ cups of water

1. Mix the flour, yeast and salt in a bowl. Pour the water in slowly and stir until you have a sticky — not stiff —dough. Sometimes I need just 1½ cups of water, at others I need the full 2 ½ - it depends on the flour you use and the climate. If you get a sloppy dough, don’t worry it will still make great bread, it’ll just be a nightmare to work with. Cover with a tea towel and let it prove in a warm place for 12 to 24 hours. I leave mine by the fire when I go to bed in the winter, or you could put it in a hot water cupboard or on top of your fridge.

2. The dough is ready to use when you lift the tea towel and see the surface is dotted with bubbles. Don’t be alarmed if it looks like a sloppy batter; this is the way it should look. Get lots of flour and sprinkle it on a work surface so that you have a thick covering. You don’t want to see any surface through the layer of flour. Tip the bread dough out onto the surface, sprinkle the top with lots more flour and fold it over on itself a few times so that it is a mound, and then cover with a tea towel and leave for 15 minutes to recover. Do not be surprised if it starts expanding and creeping out onto the work surface during this time.

3. Flour your hand generously and shape the dough into a ball. Coat a tea-towel liberally with flour — again, you want a really thick covering and then put the ball of dough onto the tea towel and wrap loosely. Leave in a warm place for two hours so that it can double in size.

4. Half an hour before the dough is ready put a 2-litre casserole pot or Dutch oven — I use a heavy cast-iron pot with lid — into a hot oven at 230^oC to heat up. When the dough is ready, take the pot out of the oven, put the bread into it and give it a shake to settle it into the pot. Place back in the oven with its lid on for 15 minutes, and then cook with the lid for the next 15 minutes until  the loaf is nicely brown on top. Remove from the oven, inhale and enjoy.