Table & Travel

For about three months now I’ve been mak­ing my own bread. The recipe I’m using is from a book called, Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day: The Dis­cov­ery that Rev­o­lu­tion­izes Home Bak­ing (St. Martin’s Press, 2007). The clunky title is some­what mis­lead­ing, because it doesn’t really take five min­utes, more like an hour and fif­teen min­utes, but most of this time is inac­tive. The premise of the book is that it’s pos­si­ble to make bread with­out all the knead­ing and ris­ing needed to make a tra­di­tional loaf. You sim­ply stir yeast with warm water,  mix with flour, then let the whole thing rise for 2–3 hours. The dough, which is quite sticky, is stored in a con­tainer in the refrig­er­a­tor. When you’re ready to bake it, you remove a chunk of the dough, sprin­kle flour on the top of it, shape the loaf, and pop it into the oven for thirty min­utes. The orig­i­nal recipe calls for 6 1/2 cups of unbleached flour, but I’ve been mak­ing the “Euro­pean Peas­ant Loaf” by sub­sti­tut­ing a half-cup of both whole wheat and rye flour.

 Being a tra­di­tion­al­ist I must say that I feel I’m some­what cheat­ing, but it makes a good loaf of bread and I’ve been enjoy­ing it. Vicki, who makes bread the tra­di­tional way, thinks it’s pretty good also. The authors of the book, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, have just come out with a new book, Healthy Bread in Five Min­utes a Day: 100 New Recipes Fea­tur­ing Whole Grains, Fruits, Veg­eta­bles, and Gluten-Free Ingre­di­ents—they love long titles. There’s also another new book out on no-knead bread, My Bread, by Jim Lahey of the Sul­li­van Bak­ery in Man­hat­tan. His recipe has been quite the rage ever since NY Times food writer Mark Bittman wrote about him in 2006. There’s no knead­ing, but his bread rises for about twenty-four hours before it  is cooked in a heavy pot. Reviews I’ve read about this recipe rave about the qual­ity and tex­ture of bread made this way. Maybe I’ll give it a try one of these days.