Category: press

We’re on the cover of Cooking Club Magazine, with a full four pounds of dough

jeff 43 Comments

I love the Twin Cities.  No one thinks of Mpls-St. Paul as a big media center, but wonderful local networks make all the difference for locally grown books like ours.  Zoe and I were introduced to Cooking Club Magazine though a colleague at Cooks of Crocus Hill, where we teach all the time.  She works at Cooking Club, made an introduction, and it turns out that the magazine is produced right here in the Twin Cities metro.  Locally produced, but with a national circulation of loyal readers numbering over 550,000– it’s a fantastic magazine.  Voila– they asked us to write a story, which they used on their February/March cover.

The magazine ran a scaled-up version of our basic recipe— one that produces a generous four pounds of dough (the version in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day makes 4 loaves that are slightly lighter than a pound, more like 0.9 pounds).

For more on our basic white-flour recipe, check out our Back to Basics link and fire any questions you have our way.

Five Minute Bread: British version of our 1st book on sale today in the U.K.; one of the top 50 ways to feel good this year…

jeff 105 Comments

Twenty-seven years ago, I rode a bicycle through southern England, and it was a delight.  If I was on the road in the late afternoon, someone would materialize and invite me in for tea (I fear that I might have looked lost).  It was an unforgettable first time in Europe.

I hope I was well-behaved, and that anyone who invited me in for tea will remember and give our little book a try.  Five Minute Bread has been released in London by Random House/Ebury and is available at Amazon UK, and at booksellers all over England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  Britain’s largest daily newspaper, the Telegraph, says we’re number 20 on its top-50 list of ways to feel good this year. If you’re new to our method, this book is based on our best-selling U.S. bread cookbook, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.   Our bread cookbooks are different because we make a large batch and store it in the refrigerator, where it’s ready when you are for quick daily baking (click here for more on our method and a sample recipe– 2 pounds equals 910 grams, by the way).

American readers should note that this book isn’t available for sale in the U.S., because U.S. rights to our book belong to Macmillan/Th Dunne Bks (the books aren’t allowed to compete with each other).  So, what’s new in our British edition? Read More

Thanks Peter!

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Peter Reinhart is the dean of American bread bakers, possibly the best in the world.  He teaches baking at Johnson & Wales University in Providence RI, has written six books on bread baking, and has won the James Beard and IACP Cookbook of the Year awards.  On any given day, he’s flying around the world spreading the gospel of great bread– Peter’s an international authority on my favorite subject.

So I was pleased to see his latest book, Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, which was released on October 27, 2009.  Here was a world authority giving his take on super-fast bread (he doesn’t store his dough so it’s very different than what we do in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and in Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day).   Peter acknowledged our books and the quality of our results in his own book.  Here’s what he had to say in Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day:

Page 7:  “… when I first read the instructions for the master hearth bread recipe in a recently published book, I immediately assumed, based on my understanding of dough science, that it contained way too much yeast to work as promised.  How could it possibly last in the refrigerator for even one day without overfermenting while the yeast gobbled up all the released sugar?  How could it possibly create a tasty, moist, and creamy loaf (what some describe as the custard-like quality found in great breads)?  Yet, when I made the recipe, it worked and didn’t overferment.  Sure, I saw areas where the recipe could be tweaked and improved upon, but this didn’t diminish my astonishment at how greatly it exceeded my expectations. Although I have yet to find a scientific, chemical, or biological reason to explain why it works, the results forced me to reconsider all of the premises I once held sacrosanct…”

In case anyone’s wondering if Peter’s really talking about our method, turn to page 204 of his book, where he acknowledges our first book by name, as a resource, and again mentions our “excellent results.”

Thanks Peter!

Thanks Andrew!

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Andrew Zimmern endorses Healthy Bread in FIve

Andrew Zimmern’s phenomenal career is testament to the way Minneapolis has become a great food town–he got his start right here, at the long-departed (but wonderful) Bravo. And who was his pastry chef? Zoe Francois of course.

So we were flattered when Andrew started baking from an advance copy of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, and endorsed the book on the back cover:

“…Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg have amazingly demystified the arcane and delightful world of artisan bread. Now, on the heels of time sensitivity (Hello…5 minutes???  Really?  Yes!), comes a baking book for the health-conscious, and it couldn’t be more timely.  Bottom line, I would crawl across a desert of broken glass to hop into their loaf pan…”

–Andrew Zimmern, Bizarre Foods America