no knead to need

Following a friends simple directions, I mix my first batch of no-knead bread. The recipe is simple:

1 cup wheat flour,
2 1/2 cups white flour
Some salt (about a teaspoon)
Some starter (about a tablespoon)
1 5/8 (or so) cups warm water.

You mix it up a bit and let it just sit there for a day or two. All of the ingredients are approximations, you dont even really need to measure. Then you cook it for 45 minutes at 350.

The bread is perfect, every time. One day, a baking genious blogs about the no knead method and the next day, hundreds of people drop hundreds of years of tradition for a smart, trendy, and in style of baking. I am thrilled by it, but also uneasy. No kneading felt like cheating.

I knead to sift the fine flour through my fingers, like my great great grandpa used to do so long ago, at the bottom of a dusty chute in Sicily.

I need to pick up where grandma padalino left off, filling the kitchen with energy and warmth and fresh crusty loaves.

I kneed to push a days worth of racing thoughts into the soft dough that absorbs it all.

The no-knead method yields delicious, fluffy loaves that required no sweat, no shortness of breath, no high risk of failure. I will admit that I am among the masses who have adopted the no knead method. It is too easy not too. But every once in a while I will give the dough an extra push, for old time's sake.

If not for the bubbles, then for the therapy: I need to knead.