Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a day book

i saw this book in MOther Earth News and I bought it, finally got UNbusy enough to try the bread and it is so easy..i'm on my second batch of the light whole wheat ..

you mix it up with a wooden spoon (i used a 5 quart ice cream bucket)..no kneading..you let it rest 2 hours and then put it in the frig and pull out the amount you want to bake just about anything..

so far i've made small round loaves "boules"..and reagular in bread pan loaves..i've made cinnamon rolls (fresh light whole wheat cinnamon rolls are so much better than white crappy ones)..i have my second batch in the frig and plan to make some more of those yummy cinnamon rolls, and calzones and pizzas..and some baguettes and dinner rolls from this batch..if you don't wash the bucket eventually you can get a "sourdough" going..

you can leave it in the frig for 14 days.

it is really really good..the book has all kinds of recipes..all of them stir and store in the frig doughs..

it really has a good flavor and you can add all the different things you want, fruits vegetables, other flours, whole grains, nuts..etc..or cook it like a pizza or calzone or flatbread and add things on top..

very versitile..siimilar to the one that Paul mentioned earlier this year ..

pull off the size you need for your day a nd cook it up however you want..

i've gotten to where i'm not following the reicipes..just the baking times and temps..and i'm having a lot of fun with this recipe..soon i'll try it with a little more whole wheat and other flours..but right now i'm using the 1 cup of whole wheat to 5 1/2 cups of unbl bread flour, 1 1/2 T yeast, 1 1/2 T salt, 3 cups warm water ..the light whole wheat recipe..and i like it a lot..but think i might like a little more whole wheat in it..

makes a really good nutritious cinnamon roll..omg..we love them

Thanks for posting this!

I see a lot of videos on youtube for this process, must be catching on.

I have a sourdough starter going and may try this method out.

Ummm.... fresh hot bread 

if you google it you can find the basic recipe and instr on  www.motherearthnews.com  but there are a lot of variations in the book, and tons of recipes...the bread is baked hot on a stone or in a pan 450 for 40 min you use a pan of hot water for steam and you dust the dough with flour and slash it for a crispy crust..

for other crusts, shapes, recipes, etc..the times and temps and instrs vary

for the cinnamon rolls i just flattened it all out and put on cinnamon and sugar and rolled up and cut ..let rise and baked in a pan..then put on icing

pizza and boule bread yesterday, huge batch of cinnamon rolls today and another batch in frig..had french toast from the boule this morning and have sliced breads still for sammiches..i love this new no knead frig bread method !!

yum! I have been so lazy lately and have only made occasional plain ol white bread. I am getting rather bored. this has inspired me thanks!

youre welcome..today i just pulled off 4 tiny pieces to make 4 rolls..yummy..nice to be able to do that so quickly..had beef stew with

I make bread and i find that the problem with most bread made by european women when they decide to make it at home is that they make it too dry and it comes out heavy. American women are very good cooks so probably they make good bread.

  First I make the basic mix i will later add more flour too when I knead it.

    Dissolve your yeast, you buy it dry in shops, just put the little balls of yeast in the packet into a little water till they dissolve, it will take about ten minutes say, you can give the yeast  a bit of sugar in the water to eat, yeast is a unicellular fungi and needs food once taken out of its lethargy.
  The little sacks of yeast in the packets of yeast they sell have a pretty big quantity of yeast in them one days bake so one sack will be planty i usually only make one loaf an duse half a scak of yeast. As yeast is alive, sold dormant but alive a microrganism when you wet it and add it to your bread it will increase in your bread which iit lives in eats and breathes into.

      Get a jug of salty water, as salty as you fancy you want your bread to be. i think the first recipe i did was two teaspoons of salt  to a pint of water maybe it was a litre of water, quite salty.

      Chuck flour in a bowl, it doesnt matter how much you will just add more water to more flour you add the water bit by bit,if you run out of water just get yoursel fsome more.

      You make a pit in the centre of your flour and pour the yeast and some water in the pit and stir it around with a spoon or your hand letting the flour fall of the sides of the pit a bit and get incorporated slowly into the water till the mixture in the pit gets a bit stiff and then you add more water and mix the mess in the pit till it is a more liquid mess and then you let the mess start to incorporate flour from the side of the pit again. You go on adding water till you have incorporated all the flour. You may have water left in your jug it does not matter.

      It does not matter if this mixture does not hold a shape at all you will be mixing in more flour when you knead it. Of course if you have it too liquid it will be unweildy and hard to knead.
    mixing the dough should not take too long about five minutes it just takes a long time to write about it.

    I leave this first stage of the mix to rise overnight for the yeast to work on but if it is in a warm place and suits you, you can leave it for just two hours, the bread tastes better  if its is left to rise for a while. may be you coudl put part of the mixture in the fridge in the morning and keep it till you want to use it as brenda groth does.
   
    Two hours before you want to cook it you take the mixture you have made and knead it. You put it on a floured board and knead it, probably their are pictures of kneading bread on you tube. As you knead it you incorporate more flour from the floury board, each time the dough takes up all the flour you sprinkle the board thickly with more flour. I was taught that you had to knead it till it squeaked but now i just knead it till it takes up enough flour to allow it to hold its shape a bit and my bread comes out really well, so it seems to me that kneading bread till it squeaks is just a fuss on.
    When it is stiff enough to hold its form but not very well, you can see it still sinks a bit, unless its enclosed in a loaf can, then its kneaded enough. If it is very stiff it will come out dry and heavy.

      When you judge it is stiff enough, you make it into the shapes you want to cook it in, I would have to do it and film it  to explain how to make the different shapes. I might try it later but if i do it now it will take to long.
      You make smaller peices of bread  than you mean to have because you leave these peices of bread to rise again and they do rise, the yeast fills the bread full of bubbles of alcohol that it breathes out . If i remember right yeast breathes in carbondioxide and out alchol, sounds unlikely, filling the bread with bubbles of alcohol that lose their power to make you drunk in the cooking.

    You leave your loaf or loaves or buns that you have formed after  kneading the bread to rise, on or in the pans you mean to cook them in, on oven trays or in loaf pans. When they have risen, that should take two hours you pop them in the oven.
      Two hours gone by it should be ready to put in the oven which should be preheated. If the bread rises too much before you put it in the oven, it rises more than it can manage and starts to fall in on itself again.

      It takes about ten minutes to mix bread dough and about ten to knead it, unless you do lots of little loaves, the complicated thing is the timing, is organising things so as to be theri to knead  it  two hours before you want to cook it and having the oven hot to put the bread in. It cooks in an hour unless its very flat when it cooks a bit quicker.

  If you want softer bread you put in milk instead of water. Some desert breads and buns even have fat in them and raisins and such. You can play with the bread you make. Of course plain bread is less fattening than enriched breads and very good.

  Kneading bread is a calm occupation and bread smells great, so making you own is great if you have time.  agri rose macaskie.

i've made bread from hundreds of recipes..but i find the glory of this bread..as with the bread paul was referring to is..that ...it requires nothing but simple mixing with a wooden spoon and sitting on the counter for 2 hours and then refrigerating for up to 14 days..more if you want it sourer..less if you want it fresher..but not longer than 14 days.

you pull off the amount you want to bake, and allow it to warm to bake it..but there is NO kneading, no special mixing or anything of the sort..

my basic recipe i use is 1 c whole wheat flour, 5 1/2 c unbl bread flour, 1 1/2 T yeast, 1 1 /2 T salt, 3 cups lukewarm water..

if on a stone, use a little flour on top to make a shroud and slash it..bake 450 for 40 min with hot water in a pan in the stove for steam..you can make rolls, cinnamon rolls, pizza, any loaf shape or size you want..adjust the time and the temp for what you are  baking..cinnamon rolls i bake at a lower temp 350 but 450 min..for other rollls i use the 450 but 20 min..to have a kristpy crust..in a bread pan i don't use the stone..or for the cinnamon rolls..you can make italian french or other shapes of loaves too.pizza i bake 425 to 450 for 20 to 25 min

  How do you make no knead breads, are they soda breads or are they bread that is only set to rise once? If you leave them in the fridge i suppose they prove slowly, is there any difference in taste if the rising is quick, my daughter bought a machine that made and cooked bread all on its own for her uncle and the bread tasted like white bought sliced bread of the most factory sort, i don't know how it managed it.  It is a pity to make bread at home so that it tastes of factory made bread. agri rose macaskie.

Rose Macaskie: Some bread recipes rely on the expansion during the sponge stage to develop the gluten in the bread, basically using the yeast to do the kneading.  The Tassajara Bread Book explains this a little.

What is the sponge stage?
        I let the bread quicken leaving it all night, be it in a cool place as it is allnight i don't ahve to encourage it to grow qicker and i suppose i only knead iit to get it to a more workable consitency, so as to be able to leave it loaf shaped, and then let ift rise again so that it will recover its bubblyness after being shaped. I mix it a bit wet though.
      What i wonder is after the yeast has lived in the bread and died in the dough what is the make up of the dough, it must be something different after being digested by lots of beings from th eflour an dwater mix it once was?
      One  of the advantages of making your own bread is that you know it will just be wheat flour and water i think most bought breads have things like soya dough in them now tha tchages their taste. agri rose macaskie.

"Sponge" is a particularly watery mix of yeast and flour, with no added salt.  It allows the yeast to proliferate much more quickly.  Additional flour, salt, and perhaps other ingredients are folded in after the sponge has risen quite a bit.  I recommend the Tassajara Bread Book if you're curious.

It is a very different method from kneaded dough, but the end result is fairly similar.  Sponge bread can become extremely fluffy compared to kneaded bread, but isn't always.

You're right about the chemistry being very different. A big part of it is complex carbohydrates being broken down into simple sugars, and even simpler molecules like alcohol and CO2. 

I'm not particularly happy about all the additives in commercial bread, but they don't bother me so much in their own right.  They mostly bother me because they take the place of a longer rise time.  The yeast does some good work for us, if we let it.  I think much of the difference in taste is a lack of yeast.

  Joel hollingsworth, its interesting that bread that is proving turns into simpler molecules like sugars, i was asking myself if it would turn into protiens.
    My bread is always light, I find it hard to believe a bread could be heavy unless the dough is short on water. In upright loaf bread tins the bread gets held up so the dough being a bit soft does not mean it will flatten and as it is left to rise it and cooked it will move in the only direction it can, upwards.  Though the easiest is to make a bun shaped loaf that is the shape the bread comes out in after kneading. My bun shaped loafs flatten a bit but not too much. Mind you i always leave it out to rise a lot, i don't know what happens if you don't give it much time to rise.
      Making bread  is very easy except for having to organise for a two hour space after you have kneaded and shaped it, because if you leave it re- rising too long it will sink again. It should sit for two hours to re-rise and then be popped into a hot oven. Lately i have been popping it into the oven with less time to rise because it looked alright and suited it suited me to put it in th eoven then, home made bread texture even uncooked bread texture looks just the same as bought bread so you can see if it looks allright.
    Kneading  bread is nice, pulling the edges into the middle and pushing them down into the middle so the bottom is always getting stretched and you have a puckerd top something like those bundles the three little pigs used to carry around on the end of a stick except all the folds are going towards a dip in the top rather than sticking out. The underside is the smooth and stretched side without a fold in it. Kneading bread is very like preparing clay to be used. you turn the bread round a bit after pushing a bit of side middle wards to move onto the next bit of side all on a floured baord so th ebottom does not stick to the board. This way you are incorporating quite a lot more flour as you knead.
      Maybe kneading is partly nice because the dough is warm and alive. The Janists in India, a break of sect from Buddha , their founder was a pupil of Buddha, wont eat leaven bread because its alive, though they eat vegetables, maybe if they knew it was a unicellular fungi that altered the dough they would eat it. The strictest of them wear handkerchiefs in front of their mouths so as not to breath in microrganisms to protect the microrganisms not themselves.
    The dough will pull the jewels out of rings and the dirt from under your finger nails so if you wantclean nails here is a way to clean them. It is quick to make but leaves some floury surfaces and a bowl and oven dishes to wash. agri rose macaskie.

i have been reading a lot about this 'easy' no knead bread. i'm going to have to try it. the only problem is we grind our own flour, and do not buy the flour in the store. our bread does tend to be a bit heavy at times cause it's made with only whole wheat flour.

      Bunkie weir,It is only heavy if you mix it your dough too dry, the heavyness of the bread has nothing to do with the grain. I should say i think, jami mcbride who has experience with home ground grains disagrees with this in the next posting  and i have never used home ground wheat . If it comes out heavy but it is wet enough does anyone mind if its heavy? There is  a sort of german black bread that does not have air pockets and it is not heavy to eat, it is pretty wet.

       Yeast is made with beer yeast normally, it is the same sort of stuff that turns grape juice into wine, the flora on the grape wich gives it a whitish skin, that whitish veil that rubs off, is yeast, so grapes come with their yeast incorporated already to turn into wine.

     I learnt very little maths or french, physics or chemestry, at school but biology was something i liked. Which is not to say my memory wont fail me on the subject and i used to think yeast was a unicellular bacteria when it is, I believe, a unicellular fungi.

    The air bubles in bread are not air bubbles they are bubbles of alcohol that come from the respiration of the yeast which is not like our repiration if my memory serves me and i was taught about this at school before i was fifteen because i did not do biology afterwards and i am fifty five, while we take in carbondioxide when we breath in and absorb the oxygen when the air is in our lungs and breath out carbon, yeast inspires carbondioxide and expires alcohol, which is clever as there is not alcohol in carbon dioxide, Prehaps joel holllingsworth can dot the i's and cross the t's on this bit of writting . I should research it myself. 
      Thats why you leave your dough to rise, so the yeast can expire lots more alcohol making bubbles of alcohol in the dough. the alcoholic content gets lost in the cooking, traditional recipies tell you to keep the dough warm so the yeast breeds respires and works quicker. I don't know why you knead bread except to shape the dough into loaf shapes, why you dont shape it directly into the shape it is to take when you cook it, maybe it gets easier to shape when it has risen a bit in the first proving. It allows the yeast to work on the dough for longer I suppose, it means the dough can rise and fall in the first rising and  you only have to control that it does not get to fall again after rising so as to have a nice bulging bread in the second and sometimes quicker rising, or proving i think it was called in the old days.
 
  The irish make soda bread and this is risen chemically, it is made with bicarbonate of soda as cakes are  and butter milk or yogurt what ever you can buy, the sourness of the yogurt reacts with the soda, as creme of tartar does with bicarbonate so that the bicarbonate produces bubbles. If you mix vinegar and bi- corbonate in a clsed space it will froth and the recipiente you mix it in will explode this is a chemical reaction not a live biological one such as microbes breathing.
  by the way i think it is much more normal for Americans to make bread at home than for English women to do so, so my writting about this is a lot of cheek.  agri rose macaskie.
 
       

bunkie weir wrote:
i have been reading a lot about this 'easy' no knead bread. i'm going to have to try it. the only problem is we grind our own flour, and do not buy the flour in the store. our bread does tend to be a bit heavy at times cause it's made with only whole wheat flour.

Me too.... but I was grinding because I was sprouting my wheat first so my non-gluten son could have bread.  But now I'm using soft wheat berries, grinding and then soaking for 24 hours to achieve the same end but with less work and a much lighter end result.  It's the wheat type that make a difference with the heaviness.  Soft wheat is known as whole wheat pastry flour in the store.

We (my daughter and I) just got done making pie crust with this flour and it turned out perfect - light and flaky.

I have some sprouted hard wheat flour in the fridge (sourdough style) that I'm going to add this lighter soft wheat to and try this no knead thing as soon as I get some time.

how do you sprout the flour? do you srout the wheat seed as people sprout beans? HOw do you grind it, do you have to grind it with a pestle and mortar?

We sprout it just like salad sprouts pretty much.... soak for 8 hours in water, then rinse/drain two times a day (morning and night) for about 3 days.  They only have to crack open, no lone tails to speak of, just little beginnings of tails.

Then we dehydrate them until crunchy, and grind using a flour grinder.  This is the most healthy method, providing the greatest health benefit.  This method deals with gluten, and other things in the grain. 

However, a much faster way (not as healthy as sprouted) is to mix-and-sit the flour for 24 hours, using some type of fermented/cultured liquid.  Good liquids to use are yogurt/water (with live cultures of course), Kiefer, Kombucha, raw buttermilk, whey.... you get the idea. 

Right now I have pie crust (3 cups wheat pastry four, 1 t salt, 3/4 c coconut oil and about 1/2 buttermilk) sitting on the counter for pies tomorrow.  My son can eat this 'wheat product' without any negative food reactions - yiippeee!  And it tastes soooooooo good.  He is also allergic to dairy, but not raw, cultured dairy. 

Seems our modern ways have contributed a lot to our modern health issues.  Pasteurized milk is dead, dead in bad bacteria and dead in good.

These fermented/cultured liquids have the good bacteria which grows and digests the gluten in the flour, plus it releases many 'good' nutrients during their life cycle, just as fermenting cabbage does to the cabbage.  Sauerkraut (fermented cabbage) is a very high source of vitamin C even though cabbage un-fermented is not.

Same thing happens when making sourdough.

Do you dribble the flour in the top of the flour grinder and it comes out the bottom, i have never seen a mecanical flour grinder.
  i must learn to ferment vegetables an dsuch it is interesting that th epasturising an dsuch is not really so cool i had heard something to the effect before but had not understood before. rose

If everyone will bare with me longer i have more to say about types of flour as Bunkie Weir talks of, home milled bread.

  They used to mill flour crushing it between two round stones moved by the river or wind in wind mills or water mills, as everyone knows, the first ecological energy machines. When they changed from this method flour was milled between metal rollers, i should check this out, and then the bran got shot out and separated from the flour while they rolled it, while flour milled with stones, the bran only got separated from the grain when it was sieved after being milled if they wanted white bread flour.
  The problem with the new system was that the part of the grain with most vitamins in it, the germ, gets lost with the bran. They separate some of the wheat germ to be sold to health food shops or returned to white bread flour to make whole meal flours or breads but most of it goes to feed live stock.
    If you know about seeds there are two sides to the inside of a seed that look like fat white leaves and a small bit in between that is the part of the seed that germinates. that sends up a shoot and down a roots feeding on the two swollen leaves that make up wost of the seed. The bit that shoots is the germ.
    Wheat germ has vitamin E, folic acid, vitamin B9, thiamin, zinc, magnesium, essential fatty acids and fatty alcohols, in it. Bran has dietary fiber  and minerals i am not sure that the thing i read on fiber did not include those things that wheat germ has in it and so it left me ignorant about what was particular to bran without wheat germ.
    They also lost calcium when they started roller milling because they were no longer using stones to mill with which left a certain amount of calcium in the bread, that is if they used a stone with some calcium in it.
 

    Bread is basic of western diet; a loss in its nutrient qualities is a serious loss. Didn’t the French revolution start because of a rise in the price of bread? The British government made up for the loss of nutrients making laws about putting calcium in bread and replacing the vitamins lost in the milling.
      At first they subsidized whole wheat flour brown bread in an effort to support the most rich in nutrients type of flour an dpeople bought the cheaper loaves but as the bakeries simply returned the bran to the white flour but not the wheat germ or simply colored the white bread to make a very light type brown loaf, with caramel subsidizing brown bread did not resolve the problem fo the low nutrient quality of the new bread. So then they had to make a law obliging bakers to replace the vitamins and nutrients lost in the bread, be it only with vitamins and minerals fabricated in the laboratory. Natural folic acid is healthier than lab produced folic acid.
    It seems that white bread is bleached to make it white with chlorine,in England this was  illegal in France to fill the demand for white flour. Chlorine also matures the flour making it easier to mix for big bakeries. Bread can have emulsifiers and preservatives and stabilizers and yeast stimulating preparations as well as the normal ingredients, in England, when my book on bread was written by the cookery book writer Elizabeth David twenty five years and more ago. Here in Spain even in special bread shops it can contain soya flour. My book says that one problem is the bakers aren't obliged to give you all this information.
    Soya can be considered good in vegetarian diet because if you combine eating pulses, lentils, beans, chickpea’s etc. with eating grains, you get all your amino acids, pulses have proteins with some of the amino acids that are found in the meat and that you need to grow tissue or recreate it, to mend your body and grains, rice, wheat and barley, etc., others and if you eat the two together not necessarily in the same meal but in the same day you get all the amino acids you need as you also do if you eat meat.
  The problem is i like a plate of beans and i like the taste of bread but do I want the two mixed? I think unless I am starving I would rather my breed was just made of wheat flower. Do we need bread that covers all our amino acids needs when we have problem with over feeding which seems to be so deadly in the West? Meat is cheap we don't need bread with all the proteins in it that meat has. As an ex-vegetarian who wants to return to it being one I would also say, wouldn’t a pot of lentils accompanied by a really nice grain floured bread be better than bread with soya flour in it, unless we are starving. agri rose macaskie.
 

That's a great bit of info, thanks Rose....

As an ex-vegetarian who wants to return to it being one I would also say, wouldn’t a pot of lentils accompanied by a really nice grain floured bread be better than bread with soya flour in it, unless we are starving. agri rose macaskie.

I personally do not agree that soy (un-fermented) is a good food.  You will have to do your own reseach and make your choice - but here are a few links
http://www.naturalnews.com/022630_soy_food_health.html
http://www.healthdimensions.com.au/a/186.html

I agree, flour should be fresh and whole grain ♥

fascinating posts jami and rose! i am really enjoying the discussions.

rose, the first thought that came to my mind when you mentioned the possibility of mixing bread and beans was Hummus. it could be one way to eat them together verses soup and breaad.

jami. sprouting the wheat berries till they crack, drying them then grinding them sounds like a great idea. now i'm going to have to try that! oh, and we have a hard winter whear we're grinding right now. it was given to us. we are working on growing a perennial wheat, and a perennial rye right now. got a couple rows planted and are going to expand each year. eventually we'll have enough to grind for our own use.

also, jami, great info on soy. i had heard the same thing about it affecting the thyroid. hubby has problems in that area, so i'm very careful. also, almost 85 per cent of soy grown here in the states is GMO, genetically modified, and the test results for its affects on the human body have not been done adequately imo. some tests have proved that GMOs are pretty bad on the organs, etc...

rose, very interesting about the history of grain and milling. that's why we grind our own to get the most nutrition out of it. we have a hand grinder that we bought many years ago. we can adjust the fineness of the end result to make it coarse or fine. i recently purchased during a sale a grinder attchment for my kitchen aid mixer, but haven't tried it out yet. also, dascinated by the yeast and your explanation of the alcohol and all. i'm 60 and have trouble retaining all this info...at times! 

  you will be pleased to know that the people that put out the book about Artisan bread in just 5 min a day .....has now put out a new book with the same premise.

Healthy Bread in 5 min a day

it is featured in the new issue of Mother Earth News..if you google Mother EArth news or if you google Healthy Bread in 5 min a day  you can find the new book.

Mother earth talks about the problems with rising whole grain breads and has recipes for the 5 min a day bread in this issue.

hopefully this will answer any of your questions about rising breads in the 5 min manner

Gosh Bunkie Weir. Hand grinding bread must be a real chore. Did you read a long winter of laura ingalls when they had to hand grind the flour in the coffe grinder which was such a lot of hard work.
    I agree about Jamie Mcbride's bit on about just starting the sprouting of grains and then drying them again to take of that bad stuff they put on to stop protect the grain from i can't remember what and that get rid of the gluten, being interesting and leavign the grain to soak in yogurt and other stuffs. I have written this without refering to the peice to get my vocabulary on it right. my dog is gettign bored and i have to write quick and play with him a while.  rose.