I don’t recall when I stumbled across a no-knead bread recipe in the NY Times but it was probably somewhere close to 15 years ago now. It seemed really easy and so I thought, ‘why not try it?’
Mark Bittman quickly became my hero for introducing me to something to simple and delicious. However, after making this bread every couple of weeks for 8 or 9 months, Loretta realized she had a wheat intolerance and so she stopped eating gluten. This made it hard for me to keep making these enormous loaves of bread for just me…so I stopped.
Then, just days before the Covid pandemic closed down the US, I started the Keto diet. The strict Keto diet, which is what I started with, is basically no carb and high fat. So no more bread for me. I did try making some of the community ‘bread’ recipes, mostly a number of the variants of Maria Emmerich’s protein sparing bread, including those by Keto Upgrade and Indigo Nili. They were all like little chemistry experiments which was fun. But they were terrible. Sorry. I know some people like them, but every version I tried ended up being dry, rubbery and no matter how much fat, or herbs, or cheese I added…bland as hell. Maybe it was my technique, maybe not. But after about 10 failed loaves I just stopped trying.
As the world opened back up I slowly introduced a bit more carbs, as they often suggest, and especially once I started travelling again I would ‘cheat’ and east some baked goods here and there. I also moved to eating low net-carb bread/tortillas/buns regularly, but I still wasn’t fully back on the bread train.
Until now.
I recently moved away the Keto diet…though with a plan to stay as low carb as I can manage. Thankfully it was just before Loretta decided to take a baking class. Not that I planned it that way. I swear. It was just impeccable timing which allowed me to enjoy the brownies, cookies, scones, cinnamon rolls and more. 
Anyway, for years I had dreamed about getting a stand mixer, even though we didn’t have much use for it. But now…we did!
So we splurged and got one. Loretta has made some truly delicious things. Having the mixer and being jealous of her skills, has spurred me to start baking bread again. Which has been quite the journey.
My goal has been to create a lower net carb sandwich bread, similar to the excellent Hero Bread…which is ridiculously expensive.
After watching way too many YouTube videos from Glen and Friends, ChainBaker and King Arthur Baking, I decided to do something nerdier. I had all the crazy ingredients to make low carb bread, so I thought it would be interesting to use ChatGPT to tweak this recipe Unbleached Bread Flour Sandwich Bread Recipe - Arrowhead Mills with my ingredients. I went through various iterations and made many, many loaves and finally ended up with a pretty good one:
Now that I had a repeatable loaf that I liked, I decided to try a couple of variants using the Tangzhong and Yudane methods of preferment. From all that I’ve read, these preferments help create a softer, lighter bread. I started with the Americas Test Kitchen version of Tangzhong, but after 3 loaves, I switched to the Yudane method based on a Novita Listyani YouTube video. I love the science-y part of her videos and the method is just a bit easier/quicker. It came out really good…except for the look of the top where the bread rose into the film:
Finally I decided to try my hand at a whole wheat bread. So I started with the King Arthur No knead 100% whole wheat bread recipe and started my experiments. It only took 3 tries to get to a really delicious loaf:
So the next thing will be to work on making this even softer and lower carb. I may swap the water for milk and some of the wheat flour for bamboo flour. And I’ve just started reading about how Einkorn flour is supposed to be even more digestible given it’s never been hybridized. So that may be a future experiment as well.