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...