Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day — Book Review

by Colleen | September 23, 2009 9:34 am

There is noth­ing quite like the smell of bread bak­ing.  Unless of course it’s cake or cook­ies bak­ing.  But bread fills the house with that mor­eish, yeasty fra­grance you just can’t get enough of.  Recently I pur­chased a fab­u­lous book titled “Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.”  You start with a basic dough from the mas­ter recipe that can be kept in the fridge until you want to bake some­thing.   At which point you take some of the dough and add your flavours, shape, bake and eat!  This week I have really been hun­gry for Tan­doori Chicken so decided to make that and what bet­ter to accom­pany this meal than some tasty gar­lic naan bread.

Mas­ter Recipe

3 cups of luke­warm water
1 1/2 table­spoons gran­u­lated yeast (1 1/2 pack­ets)
1 1/2 table­spoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all pur­pose white  flour, mea­sured with the scook and sweep method.

Mix­ing and Stor­ing Dough

1.   Warm the water slightly:  It should feel just a lit­tle warmer than body tem­per­a­ture, about 100 degrees F.  Warm water will rise the dough to the right point for stor­age in about 2 hours.  You can use cold tap water and get an iden­ti­cal final result;  then the first ris­ing will take 3 or even 4 hours.  That won’t be too great a dif­fer­ence, as you will only be doing this once per stored batch.

2.  Add yeast and salt to the water in a 5 quart bowl or prefer­able, in a reseal­able, lid­ded (not air­tight)  plas­tic food con­tainer or food grade bucket.  Don’t worry about get­ting it all to dissolve.

3.  Mix in the flour — knead­ing is unnec­es­sary.  Add all of the flour at once, mea­sur­ing it in with dry ingre­di­ent mea­sur­ing cups, by gen­tly scoop­ing up the flour and lev­el­ing it off with a knife.  Mix this in with a wooden spoon, or high capac­ity food proces­sor (14 cups or larger) or mixer fit­ted with a dough hook attach­ment.   If it get’s too dry you can reach into the dough with very wet hands and press the mix together but don’t knead.  You are fin­ished when every­thing is uni­formly moist.  This will yeild a dough that is wet  and loose which will prob­a­bly con­form to the shape of the container.

4.  Allow to rise.  cover with a lid but not air­tight.  Do not use screw top jars as the gasses will not be able to escape and the jars could explode.  Allow the mix to rise at room tem­per­a­ture for approx­i­mately 2 hours.  The top may begin to col­lapse in on itself, this is ok.  Longer ris­ing times up to 5 hours will not harm the result.  You can begin using any por­tion of the dough after this time to make your breads.

When you wish to bake some bread, DO NOT KNEAD.  Just shape your loaf in 30 to 60 sec­onds and you are ready to bake.  It is best baked on a pizza stone with some corn­meal sprin­kled on it to pre­vent your loaf from sticking.

For my naan bread I just took a peach sized por­tion and rolled it flat with my rolling pin, shaped it into 8 inch ovals and fried it in a cast iron skil­let that had some ghee (clar­i­fied fat)  in the bot­tom of it.  I cov­ered the skil­let and rotated the bread after about two min­utes.  Watch for burn­ing and adjust your tem­per­a­ture accord­ingly.  I cooked it for another 3 to four min­utes on the sec­ond side and then but­tered it with some roasted gar­lic but­ter we had made. You can use this mas­ter recipe to make all man­ner of breads and I will be try­ing dif­fer­ent types here again in the future.  If you enjoy home­made bread this is a must have book for your col­lec­tion.  Bread mak­ing at home has never been this easy!

Source URL: http://www.cakeartisan.com/2009/09/artisan-bread-in-five-minutes-a-day-book-review/

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