Artisan BreadBread Recipe,
Taken from the book,
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
By Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois
Basic Bread Recipe,
3 cups luke warm water
One and one half tablespoons granulated yeast (2 packets)
One and one half tablespoons kosher or other course salt
Six and one half cups, unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour,
Measured with the scoop and sweep method
Cornmeal for pizza peel
Mix the dough
Warm the water slightly, too hot kills the yeast. I use hot tap water added to bowl. I figure it is around 100 degrees, just what the recipe calls for.
In a five quart bowl add the yeast and salt to the water. One with a lid is good, not air tight. Don't worry about getting it to dissolve
Mix in the flour-kneading is not necessary. When you measure the flour don't press it down just scoop it with the measuring cup and sweep the top level with the back of a knife. Mix with a wooden spoon. It can be done with a mixer or processor with a dough hook. For my purposes I use a spoon. If it gets too difficult to mix with the spoon, reach in with wet hands and press the mixture together. Do not knead, not necessary.
Cover with lid, (not airtight) don't use mason jars or other tight fitting lids as there is a risk of bursting. Allow the mixture to rise at room temperature until it begins to collapse on top or at least flatten. Approximately 2 hours.
That's it! The dough is ready. After it has risen, throw it in the fridge.
Actual baking,
Prepare a pizza peel by liberally sprinkling it with cornmeal.
Sprinkle the surface of your refrigerated dough with flour. Pull up and cut of a 1 pound (grapefruit size) piece of dough using a sharp knife. Hold the dough in your hands adding enough flour so it won't stick to your hands.
Gently stretch the surface of the dough around to the bottom on all four sides. Rotating the ball a quarter turn as you go. Most of the dusting flour will fall off. The bottom of the dough will appear to be a collection of bunched ends. This will cure itself during the rising period. This entire process should only take about a minute or less.
Rest the loaf and let it rise on a pizza peel. Place it on your cornmeal covered pizza peel. Allow the loaf to rest for about forty minutes. No need to cover.
Twenty minutes before baking, preheat oven to 450F. With a baking stone on the middle rack. Place an empty boiler tray for holding water on the any rack that won't interfere with the rising bread.
Dust and Slash,
Dust the top of the loaf liberally with flour, which will allow the slashing knife to pass without sticking. Slash a quarter inch deep, cross, scallop, or or tick-tac-toe pattern into the top, using a serrated bread knife.
Baking,
After the twenty minute preheat, slide your loaf on to the stone with a slight forward jerking action. Quickly, but carefully pour a cup of hot water into the boiler tray. (I use an old metal ice cube tray) and close the oven door to trap the steam.
Bake for about 30 minutes. Or until crust is nicely browned and firm to the touch.
Because you used wet dough, there is little risk of drying out the interior.
Allow to completely cool on a wire cooling rack.
Store the remaining dough in the fridge and use it over the next fourteen days. The flavor will improve as the dough ages. When finished, you can scrape the bits of remaining dough into the bottom of the bowl and just mix new dough in. This will give it a slight sourdough taste.
That was from the book, not word for word.
This is from me.
This is the basic "Master Recipe" it works well. The book is 242 pages long it is well worth the money. I figure i can make a loaf of bread for roughly one third the price of bread from the store.
It is scary simple, fairly fast, keeps well. You can even freeze it in one pound loaves.
This will make approximately four one pound loaves.
If you have been reading my post in this thread you should have caught on by now I am all about versatility.
This recipe works pretty well as pizza dough too. Is it New York Or Chicago pizza dough? No! But it beats the heck out of a Boboli, Red Baron, or any other store bough concoction. I have made pizza outside on the Volcano,
With a slight adjustment I make rye bread, whole wheat bread, baguettes, rolls, garlic and cheese rolls, hot dog rolls you name it.
I highly recommend this book. Again no affiliation, it just works for me.
Problems you might encounter.
Sliding the dough off the peel onto the stone seem to scare folks a bit. The bread with stick to the hot stone so try to get the part of the loaf the is toward the back of the oven to hit the rear third of the stone. You "Will" screw this up occasionally. So what even if it looks funny, it still tastes great.
You will get cornmeal in your oven. If this bothers you, there is always that loaf of wonder down at the store, maybe? On that note. i call this stuff "Man Bread" it is artisan in style and texture. It is real bread. It is about as far from wonder as you can get.
Flour and water amounts will vary slightly, depending on humidity, and altitude. Adjust as necessary. I find I bake a loaf closer to thirty-six or seven minutes.
Folks that haven't baked much can be apprehensive. I constantly hear stuff like how do you know how to do all this stuff? It it hard? I don't know if I could do this.
It's cave man stuff people. It is stuff we knew how to do, before we knew how to do stuff.
If you have a hot rock or even a stick and a fire, you can bake. The rest is just fluff. I can make a loaf of bread that some people would pay $6.00 for in my Dutch Oven on a wood fire.
If your first loaf sucks, and it might, but I doubt it. Stick with it. Everybody makes mistakes. Just like life bad things can occur, deal with it and keep trying.
You can stop here and say it don't work.
Or persist and get here,
I ate some of those burnt suckers and you know what? If things were really bad they would have tasted real good,
Good luck, and please share your experiences here. Good or bad. I think the new folks need to see that it isn't always perfect. That none of us had perfect feather sticks the first time. That we had tarps blow away, and couldn't get a fire lit when we were young.
I think we should share our failures more so people can see, and learn. Not just go get crushed and give up.
Besides this bread just plain rocks,
