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Jeff Hertzberg

The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking Hardcover – October 22, 2013

by Jeff Hertzberg M.D. (Author), Zoë François (Author), Stephen Scott Gross (Photographer)

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The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is a fully revised and updated edition of the bestselling, ground-breaking, and revolutionary approach to bread-making--a perfect gift for foodies and bakers!

With more than half a million copies of their books in print, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François have proven that people want to bake their own bread, so long as they can do it easily and quickly. Based on fan feedback, Jeff and Zoë have completely revamped their first, most popular, and now-classic book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Responding to their thousands of ardent fans, Jeff and Zoë returned to their test kitchens to whip up more delicious baking recipes. They've also included a gluten-free chapter, forty all-new gorgeous color photos, and one hundred informative black-and-white how-to photos. They've made the "Tips and Techniques" and "Ingredients" chapters bigger and better than ever before, and included readers' Frequently Asked Questions.

This revised edition also includes more than thirty brand-new recipes for Beer-Cheese Bread, Crock-Pot Bread, Panini, Pretzel Buns, Apple-Stuffed French Toast, and many more. There's nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread to fill a kitchen with warmth, eager appetites, and endless praise. Now, using Jeff and Zoë's innovative technique, you can create bread that rivals those of the finest bakers in the world in just five minutes of active preparation time.

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400 pages
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Thomas Dunne Books
Publication date

October 22, 2013
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7.9 x 1.75 x 9.45 inches
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1250018285
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978-1250018281
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From the Publisher

New Artisan Bread Jeff Hertzberg Zoë François

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Every step of Zoë and Jeff's adventures in bread has been fascinating and delicious for us, the home bread bakers who follow them, but this book might be their most exciting yet because they've incorporated years of readers' questions, problems, and discoveries into every chapter. This is truly the all-you've-ever-wanted-to-know edition. And there are plenty of photographs … at last!” ―Dorie Greenspan, James Beard Award-winning author of Around My French Table and owner of Beurre & Sel cookies

“A fun, easy-to-follow collection for those who aren't afraid to shun baking traditions.” ―Publishers Weekly

“With this revised edition, Herzberg and François continue to perfect their already easy and immensely popular bread-baking method. Essential.” ―Library Journal

About the Author

Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. grew up eating great bread and pizza in New York City. He continues to teach the importance of moderation and variety in a healthy diet, and works as a medical director and consultant focusing on health-improvement programs. During his medical residency, he started a years-long quest to figure out how to make dough that was convenient enough to use every day. He turned an obsession with bread and pizza into a second career as a cookbook author.

Zoë François is a pastry chef and baker trained at the Culinary Institute of America. With Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., she is the author of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day. In addition to co-authoring the Bread in Five Minutes series, Zoë hosts her own TV series, Zoë Bakes, on the Magnolia Network and has written a solo cookbook, Zoë Bakes Cake. Passionate about food that is real, healthy and always delicious, François teaches baking and pastry courses nationally, is a consultant to the food industry, and creates artful desserts and custom wedding cakes. She also writes the recipe blog Zoë Bakes. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two sons.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The New Artisan Bread

The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking

By Jeff Hertzberg, Zoë François

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2013 Jeff Hertzberg
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01828-1
1

INTRODUCTION

Making Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: Refrigerating Pre-Mixed Homemade Dough
Like most kids, Jeff and his brother loved sweets, so dessert was their favorite time of day. They’d sit in the kitchen, devouring frosted supermarket doughnuts.
“Those are too sweet,” Grandmother would say. “Me, I’d rather have a piece of good rye bread, with cheese on it.”
Munch, munch, munch. Their mouths were full; the boys could not respond.
“It’s better than cake,” she’d say.
There’s a certain solidarity among kids gorging on sweets, but secretly, Jeff knew she was right. He could finish half a loaf of very fresh, very crisp rye bread by himself, with or without butter (unlike Grandma, Jeff considered cheese to be a distraction from perfect rye bread). The right stuff came from a little bakery on Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens. The shop itself was nondescript, but the breads were Eastern European masterpieces. The crusts were crisp, thin, and caramelized brown. The interior crumb was moist and chewy, but never gummy, and bursting with tangy yeast, rye, and wheat flavors. It made great toast, too—and yes, it was better than cake.
The handmade bread was available all over New York City, and it wasn’t a rarefied delicacy. Everyone knew what it was and took it for granted. It was not a stylish addition to affluent lifestyles; it was a simple comfort food brought here by modest immigrants.
But over the years people lost interest in making a second stop just for bread, and the shops mostly faded away. Great breads, handmade by artisans, were still available, but they’d become part of the serious (and seriously expensive) food phenomenon that had swept the country. The bread bakery was no longer on every corner—now it was a destination. And nobody’s grandmother would ever have paid six dollars for a loaf of bread.
So we decided to do something about it. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is our attempt to help people re-create the great ethnic and American breads of years past, in their own homes, without investing serious time in the process. Using our straightforward, fast, and easy recipes, anyone will be able to create artisan bread and pastries at home with minimal equipment. But who has time to make bread every day?
After years of experimentation, it turns out that we do, and with a method as fast as ours, you can, too. We solved the time problem and produced top-quality artisan loaves without a bread machine. We worked out the master recipes during busy years of career transition and starting families (our kids now delight in the pleasures of home-baked bread). Our lightning-fast method lets us find the time to bake great bread every day. We developed this method to recapture the daily artisan-bread experience without further crunching our limited time—and it works.
Traditional breads made the old-fashioned way need a lot of attention, especially if you want to use a “starter” for that natural, tangy taste. Starters need to be cared for, with water and flour replenished on a schedule. Dough must be kneaded until resilient, set to rise, punched down, allowed to rise again. There are boards and pans and utensils galore to be washed, some of which can’t go into the dishwasher. Very few busy people can go through this every day, if ever. Even if your friends are all food fanatics, when was the last time you had homemade bread at a dinner party?
What about bread machines? The machines solved the time problem and turn out uniformly decent loaves, but unfortunately, the crust is soft and dull flavored, and without tangy flavor in the crumb (the bread’s soft interior), unless you use and maintain time-consuming sourdough starter.
So we went to work. Over the years, we figured out how to subtract the various steps that make the classic technique so time-consuming, and identified a few that couldn’t be omitted. It all came down to one fortuitous discovery:
Pre-mixed, pre-risen, high-moisture dough keeps well in the refrigerator.
This is the linchpin of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. By pre-mixing high-moisture dough (without kneading) and then storing it, daily bread baking becomes an easy activity; the only steps you do every day are shaping and baking. Other books have considered refrigerating dough, but only for a few days. Still others have omitted the kneading step. But none has tested the capacity of wet dough to be long-lived in your refrigerator. As our high-moisture dough ages, it takes on sourdough notes reminiscent of the great European and American natural starters. When dough is mixed with adequate water (this dough is wetter than most you may have worked with), it can be stored in the refrigerator for up to two weeks (enriched or heavy doughs can’t go that long but can be frozen instead). And kneading this kind of dough adds little to the overall product; you just don’t have to do it. In fact, over-handling stored dough can limit the volume and rise that you get with our method. That, in a nutshell, is how you make artisan breads with only five minutes a day of active effort.
Wetter is better: The wetter dough, as you’ll see, is fairly slack, and offers less resistance to yeast’s expanding carbon dioxide bubbles. So, despite not being replenished with fresh flour and water like a proper sourdough starter, there is still adequate rise, especially in the oven.
A one- or two-week supply of dough is made in advance and stored in the refrigerator. Measuring and mixing the large batch of dough takes less than fifteen minutes. Kneading, as we’ve said, is not necessary. Every day, cut off a hunk of dough from the storage container and briefly shape it without kneading. Allow it to rest briefly on the counter and then toss it in the oven. We don’t count the rest time (twenty minutes or more depending on the recipe) or baking time (usually about thirty minutes) in our five-minute-a-day calculation, since you can be doing something else while that’s happening. If you bake after dinner, the bread will stay fresh for use the next day (higher-moisture breads stay fresh longer), but the method is so convenient that you probably will find you can cut off some dough and bake a loaf every morning before your day starts (especially if you make flatbreads like pita). If you want to have one thing you do every day that is simply perfect, this is it.
Using high-moisture, pre-mixed, pre-risen dough makes most of the difficult, time-consuming, and demanding steps in traditional bread baking completely superfluous:
1. You don’t need to make fresh dough every day to have fresh bread every day: Stored dough makes wonderful fresh loaves. Only the shaping and baking steps are done daily, the rest has been done in advance.
2. You don’t need a “sponge” or “starter”: Traditional sourdough recipes require that you keep flour-water mixtures bubbling along in your refrigerator, with careful attention and replenishment. By storing the dough over two weeks, a subtle sourdough character gradually develops in our breads without the need to maintain sponges or starters in the refrigerator. With our dough-storage approach, your first loaf is not exactly the same as the last. Its flavor will become more complex as the dough ages. Some of our readers like to stagger their batches so they are always baking with dough that has aged at least a few days—we love that strategy.
3. It doesn’t matter how you mix the dry and wet ingredients together: So long as the mixture is uniform, without any dry lumps of flour, it makes no difference whether you use a spoon, Danish dough whisk (here), a heavy-duty stand mixer, or a high-capacity food processor. Choose based on your own convenience.
What We Don’t Have to Do: Steps from Traditional Artisan Baking That We Omitted
1. Mix a new batch of dough every time we want to make bread
2. “Proof” yeast
3. Knead dough
4. Rest and rise the loaves in a draft-free location—it doesn’t matter
5. Fuss over doubling or tripling of dough volume
6. Punch down and re-rise: Never punch down stored dough
7. Poke rising loaves to be sure they’ve “proofed” by leaving indentations
Now you know why it only takes five minutes a day, not including resting and baking time.
4. You don’t need to “proof” yeast: Traditional recipes require that yeast be dissolved in water with a little sugar and allowed to sit for five minutes to prove that bubbles can form and the yeast is alive. But modern yeast simply doesn’t fail if used before its expiration date and the baker remembers to use lukewarm, not hot water. The high water content in our doughs further ensures that the yeast will fully hydrate and activate without a proofing step. Further storage gives it plenty of time to ferment the dough—our approach doesn’t need the head start.
5. It isn’t kneaded: The dough can be mixed and stored in the same lidded container. No wooden board is required. There should be only one vessel to wash, plus a spoon (or a mixer). You’ll never tell the difference between breads made with kneaded and unkneaded high-moisture dough, so long as you mix to a basically uniform consistency. In our method, a very quick “cloaking and shaping” step substitutes for kneading (see Chapter 5, Step 5).
Start a morning batch before work, bake the first loaf before dinner: Here’s a convenient way to get fresh bread on the table for dinner. Mix up a full batch of dough before breakfast and store it in the refrigerator. The lukewarm water you used to mix the dough will provide enough heat to allow the yeast to do its thing over the eight hours until you’re home. When you walk in the door, cloak and shape the loaf and give it a quick rest, then bake as usual. Small loaves, and especially flatbreads, can be on the table in twenty minutes or less. You can do the same thing with an after-dinner start on the dough—it’s ready the next morning.
6. It’s hard to over-rise high-moisture stored dough: Remember that you’re storing it anyway. Assuming you start with lukewarm (not cold) water, you’ll see a brisk initial rise at room temperature over two hours (don’t punch down); then the risen dough is refrigerated for use over the next week or two. But rising longer (even as long as eight hours) won’t be harmful; there’s lots of leeway in the initial rise time. The exception is dough made with eggs or dairy, which should complete its rising in the refrigerator if it goes beyond two hours.
Given these simple principles, anyone can make artisan bread at home. We’ll talk about what you’ll need in Chapters 2 (Ingredients) and 3 (Equipment). You don’t need a professional baker’s kitchen. In Chapter 4, you’ll learn the tips and techniques that have taken us years to accumulate. Then, in Chapter 5 (The Master Recipe), we’ll lay out the basics of our method, applying them to a simple white dough and several delicious variations. Chapter 5’s master recipe is the model for the rest of our recipes. We suggest you read it carefully and bake it first before trying anything else. You won’t regret it. And if you want more information, we’re on the Web at BreadIn5.com, where you’ll find instructional text, photographs, videos, and a community of other five-minute bakers. Other easy ways to keep in touch: follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/ArtisanBreadIn5, on Facebook at Facebook.com/BreadIn5, on Pinterest at Pinterest.com/BreadIn5, or on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com/BreadIn5.
Visit BreadIn5.com, where you’ll find recipes, photos, videos, and instructional material.

Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François

(Continues...)Excerpted from The New Artisan Bread by Jeff Hertzberg, Zoë François. Copyright © 2013 Jeff Hertzberg. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas Dunne Books; Second Edition, Revised (October 22, 2013)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250018285
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250018281
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.9 x 1.75 x 9.45 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #16,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11 in Christmas Cooking
- #33 in Bread Baking (Books)
- #139 in Quick & Easy Cooking (Books)

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Zoe Francois
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I am Zoë François and I love to bake. I am a professional pastry chef, recipe consultant, cookbook author, food photographer, host of Zoë Bakes on Magnolia Network and a celebrated baking instructor. The best-selling cookbook series Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which I co-authored has taught nearly 1 million people to bake bread. My first solo cookbook, Zoë Bakes Cakes, was published in March 2021 and I’m currently working on Zoë Bakes Cookies, set to be published in 2024.
I live in Minneapolis with my husband, Graham, our two sons, and two spoiled poodles!
You can learn more about my baking adventures at ZoeBakes.com, on Instagram @ZoeBakes and on Substack at zoefrancois.substack.com.
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Jeff Hertzberg
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You might think a doctor makes an unlikely cookbook author. But careers take interesting twists and turns--after a few years in medical practice, I trained in medical computer science, and established a consulting practice, helping develop computer systems to track and improve the health of people with chronic diseases. As my own boss, I had time to spend with my young children. Making my own time also let me indulge my obsession with food, baking, and recipes. I'd come to Minneapolis in 1987 for a medical residency, and it's a great town, but in 1987, the artisan bread revolution hadn't hit. I pined for the great European and ethnic breads I'd grown up with in New York City. So my wife, a talented college co-op baker, taught me the traditional bread-baking method, and I was hooked. I read everything that had ever been written about bread baking and fantasized about building a backyard brick oven.
Working 100-hour weeks, I didn't really have time for a new hobby. So I started tinkering and experimenting, and found that dough can be stored for much longer than traditional books recommend, so long as it's mixed very wet--and having the dough pre-mixed and ready to go is what saves time for busy people. Baking professionals might say that a high level of "hydration" allows for a very long "ritard" phase under refrigeration. But then, most professionals wouldn't be willing to try storing mixed dough in the fridge for two weeks.
Except for chef Zoë François, whom I met in our kids' music class. I told her about a fluke experience I'd had in 2000--calling in to Lynne Rossetto Kasper's The Splendid Table radio show, and asking how an amateur like me might get a cookbook into print--a bread cookbook that promised artisan bread in five minutes a day. An editor was listening and had requested a book proposal, but I never did it--my wife and I'd gotten too busy with our second daughter. This wonderful offbeat opportunity never would have amounted to anything without the blessing of a chance meeting. Zoë was more of an adventurer than her peers, so we got busy on a proposal, and ultimately, the manuscript for Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.
Artisan Bread sold out within days during the busy Holiday season of 2007. With great reviews and the strong support we provide at the Artisan Bread website, we did well enough to garner a second book offer. Our readers had asked us for whole grain and gluten-free versions of our method, so that's what we wrote. Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day has been a joy for me, in part because it let me continue to contribute to preventive health.
Not to mention letting me continue to bake bread twice a day.
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The cookbook that changed my life

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 24, 2013

Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )Verified Purchase

As far as culinary skills go, I'm just an average guy in the kitchen. For years my wife has done the majority of the cooking, because she's better at it and much faster than I am. We typically divide the duties with me outside at the grill (if the meal requires anything to be grilled) and her inside doing the real work. Because of some work schedule changes, I've had to up my game a bit in the kitchen, but I still just consider myself a B student in the kitchen.

This cookbook completely changed my "average" image though. I've been baking bread with the original edition of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day since January 2011 and I have literally become renowned in my neighborhood and at work for baking amazing bread. One by one I've had half the dads in my neighborhood over and taught them how to bake amazing bread.

It couldn't be simpler.

For the basic recipe, you mix yeast, salt, water, and flour in a big tub and put it in the fridge to rise and chill overnight. Then the next day you can start baking. Bake however much you want, and then leave the rest of the dough covered in the tub for up to two weeks. You never have to kneed or punch the dough. And besides the initial rise, you only need to let the formed loaves (I always bake more than one) rest and un-chill for about a half hour before you bake them.

I can whip up a batch of dough in less than ten minutes. I store all my ingredients in plastic storage containers out in the garage, so I just grab what I need and bring it into the kitchen. I always mix the double batch recipe that they describe as the "6-2-2-13 rule" in one of the sidebars. That way I have plenty of dough to make loaves for my family and make enough to take in to share at work.

I rarely make the dough and bake it on the same day, because the dough is stickier and harder to work with at first. Although you CAN form and bake the loaves after the initial three hour rise, it's a lot simpler to let the dough chill overnight before you try to bake with it.

The results are amazingly beautiful and delicious (and cheap) loaves of bread. I wish I could post pictures here, but I don't think I can add images until after the book is released to the public in October.

The book has a great variety of recipes. I love making the deli rye and pumpernickel. Or if you prefer the simplicity of the master recipe, it's easy enough to stick with the master recipe and just slightly modify it by adding other ingredients. You can add fresh rosemary to make herb loaves. My wife's favorite is for me to add a cup of sunflower seeds before mixing. Another favorite of mine is to substitute dark beer for half of the water and add a cup of grated cheese and a cup of chopped fresh jalapenos.

I think what I like most about these recipes is that they have a very wide margin for error. It's pretty hard to botch this up. Plus it's very easy to modify the recipes to suit your taste. If you like the flavor of yeast, then use more yeast. If you're watching your sodium, cut back on the salt. If you find that the dough is coming out too dry, add just a touch more water and cut back a half a cup of flour at a time until you find your perfect blend.

Another simple thing to do is start with the master recipe and just add your favorite seeds to the top before you bake. Sesame seeds are my favorite. Flax seeds are also delicious. It's such a simple way to completely change the flavor of the loaf, all with the same batch of dough.

Once you feel comfortable with the basic "master" recipe, it's very easy to branch out to the other recipes in the book. I've enjoyed all of the recipes that I've tried: whole wheat, semolina, English granary with barley malt and malted wheat flakes, and more. They're all amazing.

What do you need to get started? Not much really, but I found that some extra accessories like a baking stone, pizza peel, and parchment paper really made things go better for me. I've put together a list of items in this collection:

REVISED LINK: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/2UN6876ZMFBSA/ref=pdp_new_wl?reveal=all&view=null

Keep it cheap!

The best way to keep the price down is to buy the staple items at a big store like Smart & Final. Individual yeast packets at the grocery store are probably the most expensive ingredient (about a buck per packet). It's a lot cheaper to buy a pound of yeast for under $4 at Smart & Final. Same goes for the flour: buy big bags of flour at Smart & Final to save money.

For any of the difficult ingredients like rye flour (which is nearly impossible to find in my neighborhood) I just buy it here on Amazon. Anything I can't find here at Amazon I can find pretty easily (but not as cheaply) at King Arthur.

What's new in this edition?

I've been using the original edition of this book for years. The "New" edition has some nice new changes.

* Weights & Measures: All of the measures for the ingredients are now listed in tables. Instead of just listing the measurements in cups, they are listed in U.S. units (cups, tablespoons, etc.), metric units, and also by weight. The most exact measurement is the weight, because regardless of how firmly or lightly you pack your scoops (resulting in different quantities), the weight is what it is. If you pack your cups densely, then 13 cups of flour will be more than is intended. But if you measure by weight, it doesn't matter how many cups you scoop.

* More photos: A picture is worth a thousand words. The original edition had good photos, but this one has even more. They really help.

* More recipes: The authors have a very active website with a thriving base of fans. They've done a nice job in this edition of adding some extra recipes suggested by or inspired by these fans.

* FAQ: This edition includes a great list of Frequently Asked Questions that have come up on their website.

* Gluten free: They've added an entire chapter of gluten free recipes.

* Tips & Techniques: They've expanded the contents of the Tips & Techniques chapter to provide even more helpful items.

* Improved index: The authors' description mentions an enhanced index. The advanced reviewer copy that I have doesn't include the index yet, so I'll just have to take their word for it. I thought the index in the original version was pretty strong, so I'm eager to see what they've done to improve it. Sadly the table of contents is still really bad. It just lists the chapters without any details. (Was pumpernickel listed under The Master Recipe or Peasant Loaves? Gaaah!)

I am obviously a huge fan of this technique and these recipes. I've personally coaxed dozens of my friends to buy the first edition and try baking for themselves. I've also given many copies of the first edition as gifts to friends. It's been a blast to see regular guys like me learn to bake amazing breads for our families. A bunch of us even got together and had a huge "Dad's Bake Sale" to raise money for one of our kids' sports teams. It was a huge success.

I'll see if I can post some photos in the comments below (you can't link to them in the body of a review like this).

Give it a try and have fun with it!

EDIT: I've updated the link to the collection of tools. Hopefully Amazon preserves the link.

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EJ

Not just a recipe...a lifestyle

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 10, 2013

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Simple enough to get started immediately, with little hassle or fuss. Exhaustively detailed enough to provide months of learning and pleasure experimenting and refining your skills!

Taste-wise, the results are fantastic. I spend a lot of time in France, and the bread I baked from this book on my very first try is at least as good as your average bakery in the country known for its amazing bread. It is not as good as the very best, but as a simple daily 'everyday" bread, this book gives you a near perfect solution.

The secret to the book's popularity is not just the excellent recipes, but the carefully thought out no-knead method using high moisture dough. The water in the dough develops the gluten, making kneading unnecessary. The book is well written, well organized and attractively laid out with photos and info boxes with additional information engagingly presented. It simply and clearly details everything you need--the ingredients to buy, the skills you need to develop, tools to buy, etc.--in order to make fresh homemade bread part of your lifestyle.

At the core of the authors' method is a secret most professional chefs already know: You can make your bread dough in advance and store it in the refrigerator, and it actually gains flavor over time. This is super convenient as you can mix when you have time, and just pull out the ready-to-bake dough when you want it! While this is not anything new (I learned it years ago from a professional chef friend of mine), the authors do a wonderful job exploring in detail how to use this concept to simplify your life.

The "master recipe," the core of the book, makes enough dough for 3-4 loaves; You can keep it in the fridge for up to two weeks, snipping off a piece of dough to bake whenever you have a hankering for bread. Everything in the book is meticulously documented, clear and simply written.

The authors do a particularly good job describing the trade-offs between time-saving methods and superior results. For example, a longer preheat of the pizza stone you're baking on may give you a more divine crust, but you may prefer to save energy and time with a shorter preheat; the authors demystify the issue and clearly describe the trade-offs so you can make your own decision. This is a pleasant contrast from cookbooks that simply tell you the way things must be done and don't offer you reasons why or clearly explain how much difference it makes if you take a short cut.

The section on "what to buy" also strikes the perfect balance between perfectionism and practicality. For example, the authors recommend a dough whisk to mix the dough, saying it works faster than a wooden spoon and offers less resistance. But for those who don't have this implement, and may not want to buy one, they note, reassuringly, "a wooden spoon works fine."

Another thing I like about the book is the troubleshooting section. If your bread's crust is not crunchy enough, for example, it lists three possible ways to fix it.

Is it really just five minutes a day? Well, almost...for me, on mixing day it takes about 10 minutes of my time, and on baking day, another ten minutes of active work. The method is simple: You mix four ingredients (yeast, warm water, salt and flour) in a large bowl or plastic container, let it rise for two hours on the counter. The "master recipe" makes enough for 3-4 loaves. You pop it in the fridge, where you can leave it up to two weeks, and whenever you want to bake, snip off enough for a loaf, shape it rapidly and let it rest.

Another tradeoff in the book is that a longer rest time gives you better "crumb" or the texture with nice big holes in it. The authors recommend a minimum of 40 minutes but up to 90 minutes; I get great results with an hour. Once it's rested, you score it with a knife, slide it into the oven onto a hot pizza stone and cook for a half hour. Hot bread comes out of the oven 1.5 hours after you start. (Do I chow down on the hot bread? Sadly, no. The authors recommend cooling completely because the texture is best if you don't cut too early.)

If you want your bread ASAP, you can simply snip off some dough and make a Naan in a cast iron skillet. Just snip off the dough, roll it out into an oval, and cook 2-3 minutes on each side. The results are stunning: The best Naan I've had in my life! The smaller the amount of dough, the less "resting" time you need: The baguettes and the dinner rolls in the book, also made from the master recipe dough, take about forty minutes from the time I decide I want one.

This book is one of two that, in recent years, have popularized the no-knead high moisture method. The other is My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method . The main difference between the two are that Artisan's master recipe details an initial two-hour rise on the counter, while Lahey's method uses less yeast for a slow rise of 12-18 hours; you have to plan ahead more with Lahey but the method also involves minimal labor. Another difference is that this book's master recipe uses all-purpose white flour, while Lahey's uses bread flour--whole wheat or white, depending on the recipe you choose. (There are some whole-wheat recipes in the Artisan book but the core of the book is the all-purpose flour master recipe.)

I have used the Lahey recipes a couple times and find overall they are slightly more marvelous than the Artisan breads. However, since the Lahey method only occasionally fits into my lifestyle, I use the Artisan method regularly.

One area of significant discussion among afficionados of no-knead high-moisture breads is whether the slow rise or faster rise is better. I have been experimenting with using a longer rise on Artisan's master recipe--and I like the results. The authors recommend a two-hour rise probably because they want to keep it simple, nonfussy and accessible; longer rises necessitate more lead time and planning. But they also note (and their frankness and detail is the reason they get five stars) that many people prefer the flavor of a longer rise. They note that you can simply use less yeast and wait until it rises the proper amount. (When it collapses slightly, it's at the end of its rise.)

I did a bakeoff this weekend between this book's master recipe involving a two-hour initial rise, and a test dough which rose for ten hours. The master recipe has a tablespoon of yeast, and I used a third as much in my test dough. I baked one loaf of each side by side on the same pizza stone, and then took them to a dinner with ten friends. Both breads were delicious. But when given a side-by-side comparison, almost everyone preferred the lower-yeast long rise bread because it had a less strong "yeasty" flavor. One friend described the yeast flavor as "winey." Several people liked both about the same, but those who had a preference all preferred the slower rise. I also waited two days and did another test with more mature dough, and again, the slower-rise lower-yeast version has an edge. My conclusion is I'd rather do a longer rise when I have the lead time, but the two-hour rise is just fine if I have a deadline.

In addition to providing the basic method, this book is chock full of fun and inspiring recipes--for example, three-citrus marmelade and Asian-style pork bun which look scrumptions!

I buy very few cookbooks these days as you can find most of what you need on the Internet. However, this one is really a treasure. Even if you've been baking bread for years, the book is chock full of useful professional tips you may not know. The section on parbaking alone is worth the purchase price. When you want hot bread on a deadline (for example you want to bring fresh bread to a friend's house but have no time the day of the event), you can simply cook it most of the way, cool and freeze--and the day of the party bring it and pop it in the oven for five or ten minutes.

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islandlady

Love this bread book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 4, 2023

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I ordered this as my Christmas present. I found some of the recipes online, so I started playing around with them while I waited on this and the 6 quart container. I love all the great recipes in here. I admit the one I have used the most is the master dough recipe as it is so simple to make bread a few times a week. I am not a great break maker and am struggling to get the ratio’s correct for the heat and humidity where I live, but the breads are tasting fantastic!

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machelle a.

Best bread recipe

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 21, 2023

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Homemade bread recipe with no sugar which I like. Easy to follow, basic master bread recipe followed by different types of bread you can make from the one master recipe. Then another master sweeter bread recipe followed by sweet bread recipes. Really like this cookbook!

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Emily Writer

Baking bread this way is delicious!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 17, 2023

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The recipies are delicious and it teaches you how to get really good loaves. It doesn’t really take 5 minutes a day, but I like the system they use to get frequent and delicious loaves.

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Top reviews from other countries

AphraOnline

Latest edition is fabulous for non-Americans (that's most of us, btw :-) )

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 13, 2016

Verified Purchase

I came across the 'master' recipe a little while ago online and fell in love with it, so I've just bought the book and I love that too. I have the latest edition which sensibly includes metric measurements but I suspect that others, even recent purchasers, may have been sent old stock judging from some of the reviews. I'd complain to whomever you bought it from if I were you!

What I particularly like about this book is that it gives you a wide range of types of dough to make using the no knead method which you can then adapt and play with. This is all just so easy it's difficult to understand how the 'knead and prove' method survived this long after the invention of refrigeration!

One piece of advice: The book does talk about making sure your oven is properly calibrated so that you know you're baking at the right temperature. What it doesn't cover (at least, as far as I can tell) is checking the time it takes your oven to heat up. The master recipe says to heat for 20 mins then put the dough in, knowing it won't have reach full temperature yet. However, the temperature it *will* have reached varies enormously from oven to oven. In my rather rubbish gas oven the maximum temperature hadn't even been reached by the end of the allotted baking time. So, know your oven and adjust the pre-heat time accordingly. I pre-heat for 40 minutes now, not 20.

32 people found this helpful

Julian Kerrell-Vaughan

I was very glad to see the author in action on YouTube

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 26, 2017

Verified Purchase

As someone otherwise condemned to eating the appalling bread available to us in Hong Kong, I was very glad to see the author in action on YouTube. It was this that led me to the book. I have always made my own bread in Hong Kong, but it has been a lengthy and tiresome process when I have so many other calls upon my time and a kitchen that was conceived for a midget - 4 foot x 8 foot. Not only has this made the process far less time-consuming, but the bread is absolutely delicious. I would recommend it to anyone...even to those with masses of time on their hands and a decent sized kitchen.

3 people found this helpful

Linda Gough

Not impressed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

Not very impressed with this. The texture of the bread is strange to say the least. I bought this as a gift for somone just starting out in bread but tried a recipie with them just to see. I have been baking for a lot of years now and have never had bread with is rubbery texture. I was so unhappy with this I returned it and bought the James Morton book for them. Much better book. You can make any bread and keep the dough in the fridge and it comes out a lot nicer than this. Also, any bread baker that knows their stuff will tell you that most bread benefits from kneading.

5 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

I would suggest that you can find all the recipes either on the internet or via a cheaper better produced book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 22, 2016

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I really don't think this book is worth the over £16 price tag. The paper is cheap the photos aren't worth bothering about and the recipes as someone else said are aimed at the American market. What is so special about kosher salt? I looked through a few of the recipes and to be honest I didn't find anything that made me want to start baking bread using their method. I would suggest that you can find all the recipes either on the internet or via a cheaper better produced book. Having read some of the reviews I expected a revelation but was sadly disappointed.

5 people found this helpful

Dona Bartin

Brilliant easy to follow book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 17, 2021

Verified Purchase

Love this book. I’m now cooking fresh bread daily at a total cost of 10 mins of my time. At £1.10 a loaf from the supermarket I’m also saving lots of money too.

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