The Best of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: Favorite Recipes from BreadIn5

By Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., Zoë François and Andrew Zimmern

From Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Magnolia Network's Zoë François, authors of the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day series, comes a collection of all time favorite recipes and techniques.

Dive headfirst into the gratifying world of homemade bread with The Best of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

Transcending merely a recipe book, this baking odyssey promises to be your constant companion, serving up the 80 most coveted recipes hand-picked from the prestigious “Bread in Five” series. From rich loaves enriched with eggs and butter to healthful whole grain recipes, versatile flatbreads, and even gluten-free options, this collection unravels an assortment of favorites.

In addition to old favorites, the book pulls in a few new tricks, tips, and techniques that Jeff and Zoë have learned along the way. With their revolutionary stored-dough technique—along with color and instructional black-and-white photographs—readers can have stunning, delicious bread on day one. The Best of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day will make everyone a baker—with only five minutes a day of active preparation time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250277442

Jeff Hertzberg, M.D.

Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. grew up eating great bread and pizza in New York City. He continues to teach the importance of moderation and variety in a healthy diet, and works as a medical director and consultant focusing on health-improvement programs. During his medical residency, he started a years-long quest to figure out how to make dough that was convenient enough to use every day. He turned an obsession with bread and pizza into a second career as a cookbook author.

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION

In early 2020, when pandemic lockdowns sent bread bakers into the kitchen to nourish and comfort loved ones, to rediscover a satisfying creative outlet, or merely to escape from endless days of screens, we began to hear more and more from old friends—our readers. Everyone wanted to tell us about what they were baking and what they were excited to try, and they had lots of questions too, about techniques, equipment, and ingredients. We loved the outpouring of interest. And, of course, we were busy in the kitchen ourselves.

A result of those conversations, this book represents our favorite, most reliably dog-eared recipes from all of our previous books. These are the breads that are staples in our homes, and the recipes our readers ask us about most. We’ve brought them together here so that anyone looking for a complete bread repertoire will have everything in one place. And those who are newer to this ancient craft have the perfect place to start.

We would give anything to undo the struggle and sadness of the last two years. Yet it’s been wonderful to see how bread baking, our beloved pastime, has turned out to be a salve during a worldwide pandemic. Bread has brought us together.

How This Adventure Got Started

It may have been just a little project between friends, but it’s become one of the bestselling bread cookbook series of all time, with nearly one million copies in print. It began in our kids’ music class in 2003—an unlikely place for coauthors to meet, but in the swirl of toddlers, musical chairs, and xylophones, there was time for the grown-ups to talk. Zoë mentioned that she was a pastry chef and baker who’d been trained at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA). What a happy coincidence—Jeff wasn’t a food professional at all; he was a doctor who’d been tinkering for years with an easy, fast method for making homemade bread. He asked her to try a secret recipe he’d been developing, one for which a publisher had already asked for a book proposal. The secret? Mix a big batch of wetter-than-usual dough and store it in the refrigerator. It was promising—everyone loves great bread, and here was a way to make it that was fast, super easy, and cheap (under fifty cents a loaf). But it needed work, so work we did.

We were first-time authors, but we had a publisher who liked our idea and was willing to take a chance on us. Once the thing finally got written and published, we realized our accidental timing was perfect. Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day came out in 2007, at a moment when technology was rapidly changing how recipes get into the hands of home bakers. We benefited from reviews in The New York Times, the Associated Press, regional papers, and web-based news sources—suddenly our ideas were all over the internet.

We were also among the first cookbook authors to maintain an extensive website (BreadIn5.com), where users of our books share ideas and get information that supplements the books. That let us meet a huge community of wonderful home bakers, who were happy to advise us on what recipes to develop next. Our next two books, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2009) and Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day (2011), were based on requests that came from readers, who reached us through the website or social media. Over the years, we’ve met thousands of bakers just like us—busy people who love fresh bread but don’t necessarily have all day to make it. It’s been a joy getting to know you all.

Four more books followed: updates of our first two books—The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2013) and The New Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2016); then we branched out with Gluten-Free Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2016), and Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2018), plus translations of our work into German, Chinese, and Japanese, and a version for Great Britain. No one was more surprised than we were to get so many chances to work on so many different types of bread.

Making Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day By Refrigerating Pre-Mixed Homemade Yeast Dough

If you’ve read any of our other books, you know that both of us are obsessed with food—how it tastes and how it’s made. We were both bakers: Jeff, a passionate and curious home baker, and Zoë a professional pastry chef. So, while we came to the world of bread cookbook writing through completely different doors, we both wanted the same thing—to spread the word about the delights and simplicity of home-baked bread. That’s the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day series.

It seemed to both of us that once upon a time, when we were kids, great traditional bread was available in neighborhood shops all over the United States, but sliced bread (the worst invention ever), in plastic bags, had largely replaced it without anyone noticing. Well, we noticed, and we decided to do something about it. If we couldn’t bring back the bakeries, we’d try to bring back the bread. The Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day series has been 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 can 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 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 solve 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. We figured out how to subtract complex steps that make the classic technique so time-consuming, and identified a few that can’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 our Bread in Five Minutes a Day series. By pre-mixing high-moisture dough (without kneading) and then storing it, you can make daily bread baking 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).

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, it still has adequate rise, especially in the oven—that’s called oven spring. If you really want to try a true sourdough starter, see our recipe here, which gained in popularity during the pandemic lockdown, when yeast supplies in supermarkets