I love the smell of yeast bread baking, but I don't love the time it takes or cleaning up the mess left from kneading bread. And my counter needs another kitchen appliance, such as a bread-baking machine, like my closet needs another item of clothing.

Batter breads, introduced to me by a Kona friend, Hildy Jackson, changed all that.

Batter breads are no-knead yeast breads; you beat them in a bowl instead (by hand or with an electric mixer) and let them rise only once.

The classic bread technique: proof yeast, mix dough, knead, rise, punch down, shape, rise again, bake, can take half a day or even overnight, with a fair amount of active work time required.

Batter breads are streamlined, and may even qualify as "quick." In the streamlined versions, you proof the yeast, then mix all the ingredients, beating with a wooden spoon — or dump everything into the bowl of a standing mixer and mix with a dough hook.

On www.about.com, baking expert Linda Larsen explains that the several minutes of beating allow the gluten, the springy protein in wheat flour, to hold the carbon dioxide given off by the active yeast, forming bubbles that lighten the batter.

Still, the mixing takes just minutes, especially if you organize your ingredients and measure everything first, lining everything up in order.

The dough rises for an hour placed in a pan of some sort to give it shape and baked without a second rising. These breads have a more open texture and rougher exterior than kneaded loaves but can still be tender and delicious.

Batter breads start with a "sponge" — a mixture of yeast, sugar, flour and water that sits for a period of time in a warm place and grows puffy and bubbly. This is mixed with the other ingredients to make a soft batter, which is placed in a buttered or oiled pan of the desired shape, and placed atop the stove while the stove is pre-heating, the warmth causing it to bubble and puff a little bit (or you can let it fully rise, if you have the time). These quick breads have a dense texture and make a filling breakfast warm or cold.

In either case, the smell that fills the kitchen as they bake calls to the carb-lover in all of us. And some people think the leaveners used in quick breads, particularly baking powder, aren't good for you, so prefer to use yeast.

The classic batter bread, based on a 19th-century cake or bun, the history of which is an article of its own, is Sally Lunn, a very light-textured buttery loaf that is somewhat similar to Portuguese sweet bread, although there are no flavorings other than butter and salt (Portuguese sweet bread usually is made with some lemon or anise). The dough is too soft to be shaped and is sometimes baked in muffin tins. James Beard baked Sally Lunn in a tube cake pan and recommended tearing it apart with a fork rather than destroying the moist, airy texture by trying to slice it.

Online cooking expert Beth Hensperger says that bakers around the country favor a white no-knead batter bread that's baked in coffee cans for an interesting mushroom shape and takes just two hours from mixing bowl to table (most of that time spent rising and baking, so you can be doing something else).

I played around with a recipe I found online with the intriguing title "Baked Oatmeal" — a batter bread thick with old-fashioned rolled oats — a specialty of the Amish in Pennsylvania but also popular in Michigan. I can imagine an early rising mom on the farm making this one for the family to enjoy hot, slathered with butter, as they trudge out to the fields.

Because I love panettone, the Milanese Christmas bread, I played around with a version of baked oatmeal that's studded with candied and dried fruit, but tried to keep the fat and sugar to the absolute minimum. This I bake in a 9-inch cake pan, or sometimes in 5-inch, disposable loaf pans. These odd-looking, rather flat loaves (they don't rise much beyond their raw shape) have become a favorite on-the-go breakfast for me. They have a yeasty character enlivened by the intense little bits of fruit, and an extremely dense texture, similar to a breakfast bar.

I also created a cinnamon apple baked oatmeal, with walnuts, raisins and grated Fuji apple and roughly the same proportions as the panettone-style.

If you sometimes go out of your way to drive past Love's Bakery, just for that yeasty smell, you're a candidate for batter bread baking. Try it.