No Knead Bread

I'm very keen to be able to make my own bread. Only problem being, I'm useless at it. This is a bit strange since I love cooking so much. I find it both therapeutic and fulfilling and consider myself a fairly good cook. I also enjoy baking and have made a good range of successful cakes in the past.

But give me some flour, yeast, water, salt and oil and I sure know how to turn them into something that tastes like it came straight from hell.

I don't really know for sure where I am going so wrong.  My first attempt last year tasted like stale wholemeal cake.

After seeing Paul Hollywood baking his classic bloomer on television I decided to try again. He made it look so easy. Well darn him. I watched the youtube video a couple of times to be sure what to do and carefully measured out my ingredients. Some time between this point and the bread coming out of the oven, I had sucessfully managed to turn my poor ingredients into an evil tasting stale play-doh flavoured cake even worse then the first attempt.

I think my trouble begins at the kneading stage. Paul advised me to use olive oil instead of flour to coat the dough for easier kneading. This was in order to prevent it sticking to my hands, as it wouldn't make the bread tough which might happen if I used flour, he told me.

This worked for few seconds and I was thinking great this really is easy afterall! And then lo and behold the dough morphed into some kind of cement come super glue mess, sticking to my fingers so badly that I could barely scrape the revolting mixture off.

It was nigh on impossible to knead this satanic dough I had created but I persevered with it leeching to my fingers with every kneading action. It eventually started sticking together and finally became a firmer ball that I could toss in the air. I danced a happy dance and left it to rise not once like the first time(!!) but twice, as I now understand to be an essential part of the process.

Anyway to cut a long story short, I'm not sure it really rose quite enough but I left it for the required time and then cooked it. You know the rest.

So who know you could make no knead bread??? I am becoming more determined with every word of this post to crack this and so I am going to attempt this:

No Knead Bread

Surely it will come out good, right? I'll be sure to let you know if you can bear the excitement...