A favorite childhood memory of mine is making bread with my grandmother. She didn’t mind free-form loaves, sticky hands and flour on the floor, and she worked the drawn-out process of bread making into her daily routine in a way that made it seem natural and easy. Her daily routine was a lot different than mine, though, and the stop-and-start process of bread making has never really fit into my adult life.
A new book I’ve found promises to change that, and so I thought I’d give it a try, particularly now that I have a child of my own who enjoys sticky hands and tossing flour around. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Herzberg and Zoe Francois promises to streamline bread making by eliminating the steps of proofing yeast, kneading, and punching down and re-rising the dough. The idea is to mix up a very wet dough in quantity, rise it once and then store it in the fridge for up to several weeks, forming and baking just what you need that day.
So on Sunday afternoon, I mixed up a batch using the book’s master recipe for a white boule.
Ingredients
3 cups (700 ml) lukewarm water
1 1/2 tablespoons granulated yeast
1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
6 1/2 cups (1.54 l) unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour
Instructions
1. Add the yeast and salt to the warm (about 100F, 38C) water. Don’t worry about stirring it until it’s all dissolved.
2. Mix in all of the flour at once, with a large wooden spoon and your hands, or with a standing mixer with a dough hook. Mix until the dough is uniformly moist, but don’t knead it. (It will be very wet and sticky.)
3. Transfer the dough to a 5 quart (4 liter) container that will fit in your fridge and cover it (but not with an airtight lid). Let it rise at room temperature for approximately 2 hours or until it begins to collapse, or at least flatten on top. (A longer rise of up to about 5 hours will not harm the dough.)
At this point, you can bake with the dough or refrigerate it for up to two weeks –just don’t use a container with an airtight seal. I stashed mine in the fridge and went to bed.
Baking Day
Early Tuesday morning, fresh out of bed and in our PJs, Julia and I decided to bake.
Julia will demonstrate the technique.
1. Liberally sprinkle cornmeal all over a pizza peel (or thin cutting board if you don’t have one).
2. Pull out and cut off a 1 pound (.45 kg) handful of the refrigerated dough (about the size of a large grapefruit), or a smaller amount if you have very small hands.
Sprinkle the dough with flour so it doesn’t stick to your hands (unless you like that sort of thing) and form it into a ball by repeatedly stretching the surface of the mass around to the bottom, rotating it a quarter turn with each pull.
In less than a minute, you’ll have a consistent round loaf that you can drop onto the pizza peel.
Now, wash your sticky hands and have breakfast or something for about 40 minutes while the dough rests and rises.
3. About 20 minutes before you bake, preheat the oven to 450F (230C) with a baking stone placed on the middle rack. Place an empty broiler tray or shallow baking pan on any other rack that won’t interfere with the rising bread.
4. When you’re ready to bake, dust the loaves with flour and slash them with a serrated bread knife in a cross or cross-hatch pattern about 1/4 inch deep. (If your loaves didn’t rise much, don’t worry — they’ll rise in the oven.)
5. With a quick jerking motion, transfer the loaves from the peel to the baking stone. (If they stick a little, you can carefully nudge them off with a spatula.) Then pour about 1 cup of warm tap water into the broiler tray or baking pan. Close the door quickly and bake the loaves for about 30 minutes, or until the crust is nicely browned and firm.
If you possibly can, cool the loaves completely on a wire rack before you slice them and gobble them up –it will improve the texture and flavor of the bread.
The result? Delicious. The loaves were crusty on the outside and had firm, moist and flavorful interiors. I was worried that the very wet dough would yield a dense or gummy loaf, but it didn’t. And, evidently, the technique of forming the boule doesn’t require much precision because Julia’s little loaf had the same texture as mine.
And it was great fun. I think the technique of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is something we’re going to work into our daily routine, and I look forward to trying some of the other recipes in the book.
I’ll keep you posted.
