Baking – Converting kneading recipe to no knead recipe

Damn, that looks good. I've never made this particular type of bread before, but here are some things that I do know which might help:

Butter is (roughly) 10% water and 90% fat, while lard is 100% fat. So if you substitute one for the other, you should adjust the amount of water in the recipe accordingly. The flavor will be a little different, but I bet either one would work.

I would not assume AP flour. In fact, I'd assume high-gluten bread flour. The gluten is what creates those fibers. It's the fat that keeps it tender.

This looks very similar to a brioche, so you might want to look at brioche recipes to learn some of the principles. One thing that most of them will tell you is to to knead the dough to develop the gluten fibers, and then add the butter. This I think is the key. I know that fat can keep gluten molecules from sticking together into strands, so if you add the fat later, you should wind up with strands of gluten surrounded by fat.

I'd do one or more of a few things:

1. Treat it like the dough in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, in which you sprinkle flour on top, then pull off a portion you need, then shape quickly into a ball, developing the outer skin, keeping the freshly floured side out.
2. Chill down the dough, so it's firmer and easier to work with. (and then do #1 while it's still a bit cold)
3. Put it into muffin pans or similar for baking, so you don't have to worry about it holding up on its own or even attempting to shape it. (if you can shape it a little bit, you can then put it into a pan with enough of a lip to give them some support as they rise; they might spread into each other, but you can typically break them apart after they're baked)

In general, I find that kneading dough in a mixer (unless specifically called for in a recipes) always needs more flour. Basically, when you're kneading normally, you might work in 1/2 cup or so of extra flour. And there are the issues with knowing what the proper way to measure flour for a given recipe if the measurements are given in volume (cups) and not by weight, which will easily throw off any bread recipe.