artisan bread in five minutes a day
Remember all those books I got for Christmas? Including this one?
I finally decided to try it out! There are tons of variations in the book, but I decided to go with their advice and start with the basic formula which yields a simple boule of crusty bread. The first variation is shaping the dough into baguettes instead. It does use white flour, which isn't necessarily my favorite, but it was useful to try the basic recipe to get a feel for the steps and the dough. The steps are pretty simple.
The ingredients are water, yeast, salt, and flour. It's technically a "no-knead" recipe, which is handy! The full recipe makes 4 one-pound loaves. As per usual, I halved the recipe but have only baked one of my two loaves. The rest of my dough is stored in the fridge in my very fancy non-air-tight food safe plastic container: an ice cream bucket.
Conveniently, I used the bucket as my mixing bowl as the loose dough isn't hard to mix by hand. So you mix the ingredients until totally combined:
Then cover with a lid or plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature:
After two hours or so, the dough has bubbled up considerably:
You can technically bake the bread from here, but the warm dough is a little challenging to manipulate. I decided to listen to the book again and refrigerate the dough before my first attempt. Because of my schedule, I ended up mixing up the dough on Tuesday and baking it today. This is what the un-kneaded dough looked like when I took it out of the fridge:
Just a sprinkle of flour on the surface keeps the dough from sticking while you shape it into a ball. My cutting board is acting as my pizza peel since I don't have any of that fancy stuff.
The recipe calls for a "grapefruit-sized" hunk of dough. Mine was a little small, though it does spring nicely in the oven. Still, here is a perspective shot of it sitting on the cutting board:
After letting the dough rest (while preheating the oven), you have your choice of slash patterns to cut into the dough. A simple cross or the "tic-tac-toe" were tempting, but I decided to use the straight-forward "scallop" pattern of four parallel slashes.
If you're fancy and own a lame (a razor meant for scoring bread), use that. For the rest of us, just use a serrated knife dusted with flour to prevent sticking. The slits allow the loaf to expand better and maximize the surface area of delicious crispy crust. It works!
The bread is baked at a searing 450F with a steam pan underneath the bread (note: this makes it necessary to use caution when opening the blast furnace oven door) to give it that crusty exterior. When removed from the oven, the bread crackles as it cools to room temperature.
The crust really is lovely, and the crumb is very soft. It's a little salty for my taste, but I'm not sure if I might have halved it incorrectly. When I make it next time, I was be more careful and then decide. Again, I'm not a huge white bread kind of girl (though I do enjoy it as toast!), so I am looking forward to trying out the variations including pizza dough and caramel rolls.
The directions are pretty long to type out, so I'm not going to give you guys this recipe. Sorry! One of the authors (Zoe Francois) is local to the Twin Cities, though! If you are intrigued, though, maybe you should just buy the book yourself. In addition to a multitude of bread variations, the book also includes recipes that complement the breads themselves. Spreads both sweet and savory, kebabs, salads, and sandwiches are also listed.
It's been a while since I've made No-Knead Bread, and when I did, I made the half-whole wheat kind. I want to try the whole wheat variation from this book before I compare tastes. The processes, though, are slightly different. While this recipe also uses a high-moisture dough, I found the dough easier to handle than the typical No-Knead. It also bakes on a stone (don't have one!) or a cookie sheet (what I used!) instead of a Dutch oven. Though I have a Dutch oven, it weighs a whopping 18 pounds and is stored on top of our kitchen cupboards. So the convenience factor is also tipping towards this recipe. Another plus is that this recipe yields four loaves of bread for one batch of dough instead of just one loaf of No-Knead, so the work is really minimized.
I am liking the concept and am excited to see how much mileage I can get out of this book. Where The Bread Baker's Apprentice is very scientific and methodical, this book is more approachable. I like them both for different reasons and we shall see what else I make!
I finally decided to try it out! There are tons of variations in the book, but I decided to go with their advice and start with the basic formula which yields a simple boule of crusty bread. The first variation is shaping the dough into baguettes instead. It does use white flour, which isn't necessarily my favorite, but it was useful to try the basic recipe to get a feel for the steps and the dough. The steps are pretty simple.
The ingredients are water, yeast, salt, and flour. It's technically a "no-knead" recipe, which is handy! The full recipe makes 4 one-pound loaves. As per usual, I halved the recipe but have only baked one of my two loaves. The rest of my dough is stored in the fridge in my very fancy non-air-tight food safe plastic container: an ice cream bucket.
Conveniently, I used the bucket as my mixing bowl as the loose dough isn't hard to mix by hand. So you mix the ingredients until totally combined:
Then cover with a lid or plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature:
After two hours or so, the dough has bubbled up considerably:
You can technically bake the bread from here, but the warm dough is a little challenging to manipulate. I decided to listen to the book again and refrigerate the dough before my first attempt. Because of my schedule, I ended up mixing up the dough on Tuesday and baking it today. This is what the un-kneaded dough looked like when I took it out of the fridge:
Just a sprinkle of flour on the surface keeps the dough from sticking while you shape it into a ball. My cutting board is acting as my pizza peel since I don't have any of that fancy stuff.
The recipe calls for a "grapefruit-sized" hunk of dough. Mine was a little small, though it does spring nicely in the oven. Still, here is a perspective shot of it sitting on the cutting board:
After letting the dough rest (while preheating the oven), you have your choice of slash patterns to cut into the dough. A simple cross or the "tic-tac-toe" were tempting, but I decided to use the straight-forward "scallop" pattern of four parallel slashes.
If you're fancy and own a lame (a razor meant for scoring bread), use that. For the rest of us, just use a serrated knife dusted with flour to prevent sticking. The slits allow the loaf to expand better and maximize the surface area of delicious crispy crust. It works!
The bread is baked at a searing 450F with a steam pan underneath the bread (note: this makes it necessary to use caution when opening the blast furnace oven door) to give it that crusty exterior. When removed from the oven, the bread crackles as it cools to room temperature.
The crust really is lovely, and the crumb is very soft. It's a little salty for my taste, but I'm not sure if I might have halved it incorrectly. When I make it next time, I was be more careful and then decide. Again, I'm not a huge white bread kind of girl (though I do enjoy it as toast!), so I am looking forward to trying out the variations including pizza dough and caramel rolls.
The directions are pretty long to type out, so I'm not going to give you guys this recipe. Sorry! One of the authors (Zoe Francois) is local to the Twin Cities, though! If you are intrigued, though, maybe you should just buy the book yourself. In addition to a multitude of bread variations, the book also includes recipes that complement the breads themselves. Spreads both sweet and savory, kebabs, salads, and sandwiches are also listed.
It's been a while since I've made No-Knead Bread, and when I did, I made the half-whole wheat kind. I want to try the whole wheat variation from this book before I compare tastes. The processes, though, are slightly different. While this recipe also uses a high-moisture dough, I found the dough easier to handle than the typical No-Knead. It also bakes on a stone (don't have one!) or a cookie sheet (what I used!) instead of a Dutch oven. Though I have a Dutch oven, it weighs a whopping 18 pounds and is stored on top of our kitchen cupboards. So the convenience factor is also tipping towards this recipe. Another plus is that this recipe yields four loaves of bread for one batch of dough instead of just one loaf of No-Knead, so the work is really minimized.
I am liking the concept and am excited to see how much mileage I can get out of this book. Where The Bread Baker's Apprentice is very scientific and methodical, this book is more approachable. I like them both for different reasons and we shall see what else I make!