Baking with Beth: Meridee's Artisan Bread

...or, Beth's Ghetto Bread

Meridee found this great book about how to make artisan-style bread in just 5 minutes a day. It's called, How to Make Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Doesn't that sound like the oldest gimmick in the book? I bet if I send them 6 box tops and $19.95 plus shipping and handling they'll send me a free trip to Hawaii, too! Please.

The truth is, it takes more than 5 minutes (i.e. 2 hours of allowing the bread to rise), but the bread is REALLY GOOD and REALLY EASY!

And when it comes to making bread, let's just say I ride the short bus. Everytime I try to make bread it turns out dry, unrisen, or in some other way, not worth the 3 hours I spent making it. (suddenly paying $6 a loaf for good bread at the farmer's market seems more affordable)

I don't have a mixer (because I broke it) and I lost the cute little paddle that mixes and kneads the dough in my bread machine. As long as I'm admitting all my culinary faults, let's get out in the open that I tend to break ANY and ALL of my kitchen appliances, giving them a relatively short (but meaningful) life. This explains why I no longer have a blender...or a hand mixer...or a crock pot (actually Meridee recently handed me down hers)...or an electric rice cooker...you get the picture, right?

So with that background, let me say that I produced moist, dense, crusty bread with the first batch I tried! Did I mention that there's no kneading involved? Genius! I'll never knead again! Another bonus to this recipe is that it makes enough dough for 4-1lb. loaves. Technically, you can bake one loaf at a time and save the rest in your refrigerator for another day. But I don't think you'll want to do that. What you'll want to do is bake all four loaves at the same time, eat 1 1/2 loaves by yourself as soon as they come out of the oven (hot and moist and delicious!!!), let your kids share 1/2 a loaf for an afterschool snack, and then have some elegant, European-style bread with your campbell's soup for dinner! And, if you're a compassionate, servicing leader (as it were) of a person, you might want to share one tiny loaf with a neighbor or friend.

The recipe is easy enough for me, so any fool with a pizza stone can duplicate it, k?

Buy the book if you want all the fancy-dancy terms and reasoning behind why the recipe is the way it is, but use my ghetto version for now.

Meridee's Artisan Bread/Beth's Ghetto Bread

3 c. lukewarm water

1 1/2 tbsp. kosher or coarse salt

1 1/2 tbsp. yeast

6 1/2 c. flour

cornmeal for pizza peel

In a 5 quart ice cream bucket put in water, then salt and yeast. Then add all the flour and mix with a wooden spoon until there are no dry patches left. Put bucket lid on (or saran wrap - loosely) and allow to rise for 2-3 hours, or until dough has collapsed or at least leveled off.

Sprinkle dough with about 1/2 c. flour, divide dough in half with a butter knife while dough is still in bucket. Then cut one of the halves in half again, and pull out with your hands 1/4 of the dough from the bucket. Quickly fold sticky ends under the dough, forming a ball. Place shaped ball on a *pizza peel sprinkled with cornmeal (or a wooden cutting board - I think it needs to rest on wood so that it breathes better) Allow to rest for 40 min. Twenty minutes before baking, place a cookie sheet on the bottom rack and a pizza stone on the middle rack and preheat oven to 450 degrees. After bread has rested for forty minutes, sprinkle each loaf with about a tbsp. of flour and with a serrated knife cut a tic-tac-toe or X pattern into top of bread, penetrating about a 1/2".Carefully and quickly pick up dough and put onto preheated pizza stone and then pour two cups of water into cookie sheet below and close oven door to trap steam. Bake for 30 min., or until crust is golden. Allow loaves to cool for at least an hour on a wire rack. (Or use an oven mitt to cut into crust furiously so that you can stuff a buttered, jammed piece in your mouth as fast as humanly possible)

Note: You don't have to cook all your dough at once. You can cook one loaf at a time and just leave the remaining dough covered in your fridge for up to 2 weeks (right Meridee? or 1 week?)

*a pizza peel is one of those fancy paddles that real fancy restaurants use for getting fancy pizzas out of fancy brick ovens. I don't have one of those, and I don't even have a wooden cutting board. So, you know what I used? A board out of my garage (settle down! I washed it first!) and it worked great. What part of the term GHETTO bread don't you understand?