Fresh bread, hot from the oven. No other smell makes a house feel more like a home. This time of year especially, I want bread with everything. Hunks of it with hot soup and chili, cinnamon buns with coffee, garlic bread and pasta. Cold weather and carbs make a happy partnership.
In an effort to warm up my home with the kind of lovin’ you can only get from the oven, I tried out the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoe Francois. It promises the kind of crispy crusted, soft crumbed, artisan style breads once available in every-ones local bakery, just down the street. Now as those sort of “just around the corner” type places disappear, it is possible to recreate it in the comfort of your own home.
First thing, there is a rather long list of things that the book suggests one must purchase before starting. To get the basics, it required an afternoon spent in Winners and Cookworks trying to find things like an oven thermometer and pizza stone. I was probably a good $175.00 invested before water ever met flour. Not that all this stuff will be useless if I never make bread again, but I’m just saying, there is an equipment investment involved.
The books main premise is that you don’t have to knead the dough. Ever. This is a bit of a head scratcher as all previous bread making teachings and experience, not to mention a stint in a bakery, is adamant about kneading, window tests, and gluten production. In the book it tells you to just mix everything really roughly in a plastic container, that’s it. You don’t even need to mix it well. Just stir together and leave it.
This creates a very slack dough, as in quite on the wet side. In theory this is supposed to give it a sort of spongy constancy that will rise well. I just found I ended up with a very sticky, wet interior and slumped over, flat round loaves. There is a great section in the beginning of the book on suggestions to fix various problems, but I found that most of them were ways of sorting out problems caused by the actual “no knead” technique of the book in the first place.
There is also no way that this is bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Sure, you could mix dough in that 5 minutes, but all other stages still took hours. Before the dough could go in the fridge it had to proof on the counter for two hours. After it then came out of the fridge and was shaped it needed ages as it needed to come to room temperature first, and then actually rise.
Not that the motivation behind the book is bad, not at all. All the recipes are much lower in sugar and have none of the preservatives present in commercially baked breads. This is great. It gets people to try baking bread and hopefully they find that it is not nearly as hard as they thought. It’s also really nice to have a tub of dough waiting in the fridge for when creative impulses strike. I was able to make a pan of cinnamon buns in the time it took to get ready for work, and Friday night pizza took less time than it would normally take to wait for delivery.
This book was a great motivation to get back to making bread again, but I have a bad feeling that someone really not familiar with baking bread would get discouraged by the results pretty quickly. However, now that I have started baking my own bread fresh at home, I’m only more motivated to try to tweak it and get it right.
As a comparison, I will be doing another no knead recipe sent to me by my new mum in law. Is sounds very similar, but involves leaving the dough to ferment at room temperate for 18 hours, proofing on a piece of parchment, and then putting the dough, parchment and all, in a preheated pot in the oven. Sounds just about crazy enough to work. I will let you know!
Woman Eats City 