To knead or not to knead...

I was flipping through a magazine, waiting for my daughter to finish her gymnastics class, and came across the obligatory “no-knead bread” recipe. The rolls looked good, wrapped around some grated parmesan and herbs, and I’ll probably try them. But for the first time I stopped to wonder – why do we assume kneading is undesirable?

I see the appeal, and I don’t really harbor any delusions about baking the family bread each day, but we tend to take for granted that the thirty-minute-dinner, the one-pot-supper and the no-knead-bread are improvements. Speedy, efficient and fast, the underlying notion is to get the meal on the table and get out of the kitchen.

Realistically, there are a lot of nights when I need to make dinner in a jiffy, like tonight. Between work, homework, sports activities and the various other obligations that come with life, dinner is almost never more than a half-hour production during the week. I rely on the basic combinations of veggies, protein, starch and fruit, and the occasional pizza.

Those short dinners are creative (sometimes!), a chance for everyone to pitch in, and satisfying because we do sit down together. It’s on those same evenings when I might throw together the no-knead bread after the dishes are washed. It’s a chance to settle into cooking without the pressing need to feed everyone. It’s a chance to talk, catch up on our day, and to send everyone off to bed with the feeling (and smell) of coziness.

But I would never give up the kneading of dough. We’ve adapted a few recipes to fit our schedule - the Saturday dinner rolls are a family favorite. We put them together when it suits our schedule - in the morning, middle of the day, or a few hours before dinner. They smell good rising, and kneading them is a delight. I love to smell the dough when we knead it; my daughter is so careful about making the balls just so – she has a tender concentration I adore.

Maybe because we don’t make them every weekend, all the time, we savor them more. And sometimes time is short. That’s when we’ll make no-knead and leave it to rise in the refrigerator overnight. I’ll still keep an eye out for the recipes where kneading is required though, because sometimes that’s what we need.