Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

I'll be honest. As much as I love baking, I have never actually made bread before. It's never something that sounded like something I wanted to bother with. Then I started hearing about this bread left and right. It is so easy!

The recipe for the basic bread mix:

3 cups lukewarm water
1 1⁄2 tbsp granulated yeast (1 1⁄2 packets)
1 1⁄2 tbsp coarse kosher or sea salt
6 1⁄2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour
Cornmeal for pizza peel

Mix water, yeast, and salt into a big bowl (I used the mixing bowl from my KitchenAid mixer).



Add flour.



Mix together until it looks something like this:




Cover bowl loosely (I used a tea towel) and let dough rise for about two hours, then refrigerate. I left it overnight so it was easier to shape.

I don't have either a pizza peel or stone, so I improvised here. When I pulled the dough out, I sprinkled cornmeal and flour on a smooth cutting board I have. I sprinkled flour onto the dough and shaped a grapefruit-sized piece of dough into a slightly flattened ball. Let it rise for 40 minutes, then dust top with flour and cut lines into the top of the dough:



Meanwhile, I preheated the oven to 450 and heated a loaf pan and cookie sheet in the oven. After it heated up, I slid the bread onto the cookie sheet and quickly poured about a cup of hot water into the loaf pan, then shut the oven quickly.

The bread baked for about 35 minutes until it was done.



This bread was great, and so easy! Each batch of dough makes about four loaves. Better instructions can be found here.