Easy Artisan Bread
Posted by: TammyEasy, no-knead artisan bread has been all the rage. Mother Earth News and other magazines have touted the nearly effortless, tasty results. I was intrigued. I already make our bread but it tends to be a traditional white sandwich style bread. My boys have recently begun to enjoy the tasty, chewy, rustic type artisan breaks so when I saw the book at the library, I figured I had nothing to lose.
This is really a great book! It’s straight forward and dispels some of the myths about bread baking. They are also very honest in comparing the results of various ingredients (for example, pricey gourmet salt vs regular kosher salt) in the end products. It doesn’t take costly, gourmet ingredients to create beautiful, artisan-style breads! It also doesn’t require years of professional training at a culinary school!
Here is one of my loaves:
The most difficult thing has been learning to work with the slack, moist dough and learning how to slide the uncooked loaf off my preparation pan (I don’t have a pizza peel yet) onto the hot baking stone. It gets easier with each loaf. The only other hard thing is keeping the kids from eating the bread while it’s still hot as this bread is better when it’s cooled down.
It really is as easy as Artisan Bread in five minutes a day. It takes MAYBE 15 minutes to mix the initial batch of dough and then there is rising time which really isn’t counted because you don’t have to tend the dough while it rises. After that, you can store the dough in the refrigerator for up to 14 days (it will develop a sour dough flavor) and it literally takes about 5 total hands-on minutes to make a loaf. I’ve pulled off a chunk of dough, prepared it and placed it to rest on my preparation pan while my stone heated up in the oven. I’ve done other things while the dough rested about 20 minutes and then slid it into the oven to bake off about 30 minutes and gone off and done more things. Once it’s out of the oven, you can just leave it and walk away. Truthfully, you could make and bake a loaf of bread before work and have it nicely cooled when you got home. The fact that it’s already prepped in the fridge makes the daily chore of making the bread very easy!
I’m still getting used to the basic recipe but the book includes similar no-knead recipes for rye, wheat, and other artisan-style breads. The book will tell you how to create a crisp, chewy crust OR a traditional softer crust. The loaf I showed above is that caramelized, chewy type crust. Truly fantastic with soup and salad and learning to make your own is considerably cheaper than buying it. Artisan bread is also divine as toast with butter and jam. The large holes and moist texture make for a crisp toast that holds the melting butter. I can just taste it now! I also enjoyed slices with brie cheese (very French and delicious).
It was nice being able to borrow the book from the library for my first try at this technique but I know I’ll end up buying it simply because I really want to enjoy all of the recipes the book offers. Some books just belong in your cooking library and if you love bread, this is one of them!