For my birthday, I received a baking stone, which was on my Amazon Wish List. I was so excited that I went online and ordered Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. Oh, boy. I think this is going to lead to a bread addiction....
The premise of Artisan is this.... You make a big batch of dough and let it rise for two hours. Then you put it in the refrigerator. Any time you want a fresh loaf of bread over the course of two weeks, you cut off a grapefruit-sized ball of dough and let it rise at room temperature for forty minutes. Then you bake it for thirty minutes. And voila! Fresh bread!
And let me tell you, the first recipe, the basic one they recommend you begin with, is better than any bread I've ever had in the store or a bakery. In fact, I was at Panera last night....and Mr. Higgins joked that he'd have better bread at home. It was no joke.
I can't wait to try more of the recipes in this book! My only hesitation with recommending it (and I do recommend it) is that the process of baking the bread is made a lot easier with some specialized things that most people don't have in their kitchens: baking stone, pizza peel, and dough bucket. I only had the baking stone and everything worked fine...though a pizza peel is next on my list of things to buy, followed relatively soon by a dough bucket.
(A cookie sheet with no edge will work instead of a pizza peel. You just need something that you can slide sticky dough off of fairly quickly. For the dough bucket, a big plastic Rubbermaid bucket would work just as well... Wal-Mart has a set of plastic canister and the large one would be perfect.)
I'm excited. Bread that requires no kneading and that's this easy... Awesome!!
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