Made Fresh Daily!

Do you love warm fresh bread like I do?  Well, if you do, you better read this!  You will want to come to my house and hug me.  I swear!  Trust me.  This is awesome!

I have often thought that I should open a restaurant that had home baked bread as the base of every dish on the menu.  Doesn't that sound tasty?  Exotic french dips,  Saganaki with herbed breads, bread puddings.

My mouth is watering.  I really do LOVE bread.

Let me get to it so that you too can enjoy the beauty of warm homemade bread.

Here is how it works.  Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois wrote a book about making breads in 5 minutes a day.  I tried their technique and , I'll be hornswaggled, it worked!  You start with the Master Recipe.  It looks like this:

Master Recipe
3 cups luke warm water
1 1/2 Tablespoons granulated yeast (2 packets)
1 1/2 Tablespoons salt
6 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

You need to have a large (6 quarts is good) container that you can seal.   Into this container put the warm water, yeast and salt.  Don't worry about it all dissolving completely.  Then add in the flour a cup at a time and mix it till you get a moist and sticky dough.  Then just let this dough sit, with the lid on loosely, for about 2 hours.  The dough will double in size and then you should have enough dough to make about 4 small loaves.

 This is what the dough looks like after it has risen for 2 hours.  You can see that it is really wet and sticky looking. This is just what you want.  You can store this in the fridge with the lid on tight for up to a week.  If you let it sit for longer you will actually have the start of sourdough bread.






When you want to make some bread or rolls, you take a little flour and dust the top of the dough. and then you pull off the amount that you want.   use scissors to cut off the dough I want.  Form the dough into the shape you are looking for and put it in a greased pan or dust a board with cornmeal and let it rise for 20-30 minutes.  Make sure to put a few slices in the top of the bread so that it can expand the way it need to.  If you forget to cut the top, don't freak out!  Your bread will be just as edible but it may bust it's guts and expand out of the sides.

You want to preheat the oven to 425 degrees and if you have a pizza stone, make sure that you put it in the oven to get hot.  When your oven is hot enough you can slide your risen dough right on to the pizza stone.  To get a crunchy crust, put a pan with water in it in the oven with the dough and cook for about 25 minutes.  Keep an eye on your bread and it will be done when it is golden brown.

Always let the bread rest for 20 minutes so that it is nice and soft when you cut a slice.  

Slather on some butter and how about a little homemade apple butter.  Ohhhh, I just couldn't resist.  Give it a try.  You will love being able to say, "Hey, I think that I will make a yummy loaf of bread to go with the dinner I made."  Get creative with it too, add  herbs to the dough and bake up something that has a super yummy flavor.  If you have kids, it is a great thing for them to do on their own.  Max has made his own little mini loaves and had a great time shaping and baking them.

Let me know if you try this fantastic bread dough and how it was.  Bake on!

P.S.
Visit the Bread in 5 minutes website.  They have a great video of the whole process.
http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/