Category: Videos

How to shape wet dough

jeff 107 Comments

The secret to this method is having a nice wet dough. This allows you to store the dough and make a beautiful loaf. One of the most often questions is how to successfully shape the wet dough into a nice neat ball. If your loaf is not shaped well, it may spread out and be too flat or it will bake in a shape you just didn’t intend. Even if your dough is super wet, even wetter than we intended, within reason, it can still be successfully shaped and bake into a gorgeous loaf. We’ll show you how in this video. The trick is using more flour than you may think is okay, but as you’ll see you don’t work the flour into the dough; just use it to keep the dough from sticking to your hands. As we gently handle the dough we add more flour. This allows you to shape, without overworking the dough. Didn’t use a Bench Scraper in this video, but it is a great tool for keeping the dough from sticking to your hands.

The dough in this video is the Master recipe from The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, but this method can be used for any of our doughs.

How to Slash Dough – Video

jeff 26 Comments

slash Bin5 03

Slashing your dough properly creates a beautiful loaf of bread, but can also help it rise in the oven. If your slashes are not deep enough, the dough may tear open on the top or bottom of the loaf. Leaving you with bread that tastes delicious, but doesn’t live up to its artistic potential. The loaf can also end up being a touch dense if you don’t slash deep enough, because it won’t open up and make way for a dramatic oven spring. So, for the most beautiful crust and best interior crumb, you’ll want to follow these few tricks for slashing. Read More

Gluten-Free Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Video

BreadIn5 65 Comments

GF boule from gluten-free artisan bread in five

(photo by Stephen Scott Gross)

(video by Sarah Kieffer)

Many of the folks who are baking from Gluten-Free Bread in Five Minutes a Day have asked:

  1. What’s the dough supposed to look like?
  2. How do you handle such unstructured dough?
  3. What’s it look like when baked?

Click on the “play” button in the video image above to play the video… it’s the Master Recipe from the book (the egg-white version, though you can make a version without egg). About stand mixers: We’ve had best results with our gluten-free recipes when we’ve used a stand mixer. Hand-mixing works too, but you really have to go a long time to make it nice and smooth. We have lots of experience with the 5-quart KitchenAid stand mixer. You can use the 6-quart or larger capacity, but we’ve found that those large models have a harder time mixing gluten-free dough.

You’ll notice that we used Red Star Quick-Rise yeast, which is gluten-free (so is Red Star’s Active Dry Yeast product). Gluten-free bakers can’t use the Red Star Platinum product, which has dough conditioners derived indirectly from a wheat protein–so it has a trace of gluten.

More on gluten-free bread-baking in Gluten-Free Bread in Five Minutes a Day, or on our Gluten-Free FAQs page.

Our Artisan Bread Baking Class on Craftsy!

jeff 43 Comments

Craftsy | Breadin5 titleCard

We are super excited to announce our new Craftsy bread baking video class. We’ve made a video of our most popular breads with lots of tips and techniques for getting a professional loaf every time you bake with very little time or effort! It is the perfect companion to all of our books. In the video we’ll use a single dough to create all the breads, but the techniques are useful for all the doughs from any of our books.

Craftsy Bread Class | Breadin5 01

Here’s some pictures from our video shoot in Denver. Our readers get 50% off the video by clicking the link below. This offer only lasts for two weeks, so join us soon!

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Five Rules for Making Great Grilled Pizza Outdoors on the 4th of July, With Red Star Platinum Yeast: NEW VIDEO!

jeff 44 Comments

artisan bread in five pizza on the grill

Getting a perfect result with homemade pizza on the gas grill in the summertime is easy–you just need to mix up some lean dough from any of our books–we’ve been testing with Red Star Platinum Yeast–with fantastic results (today’s dough was the light whole wheat, but you can use any of our lean doughs)…

Platinum Yeast | Breadin5

… and follow a few simple rules from Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day…

artisan bread in five pizza on the grill

1.  Clean the grill’s grates
2.  Get your dough thin, to 1/8 of an inch thick
3.  Bake the first side of the crust “blind” (without toppings) for about three minutes, then flip and top. Prep all your toppings in advance.
4.  Cut the cheese into small cubes, or grate it so it melts fast, before the bottom crust burns. That way, after flipping and topping, the pizza will be finished in five to ten minutes, depending on burner heat and position under the pizza.
5.  Don’t overload with toppings

grilled pizza from artisan bread in five

Here’s a video on how to do it: (includes demo of pizza dough-throwing technique):

The Flatbread Braid, New Video: How to Braid a Flat Circle

jeff 29 Comments

Braided

Zoe did a great post last month on a traditional braided loaf (made with peasant dough). I thought now might be a nice time to do a new video (it’s way at the bottom of this post), showing one of my favorite techniques, the flatbread braid. Flat or traditional tall, these techniques also work great with challah or brioche dough (but you need to bake those lower temp (350F) because of the egg and sweetener in the challah or brioche). As in the photo, you can turn around a straight braid to make a very festive ring, and I topped it with egg wash and poppy seeds. This dough is about 50/50 whole wheat and white flour, which is a wheatier version of the Light Whole Wheat (you don’t have to use the “old” dough). The 50/50 recipe appears in The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.  Read More

Savory Bread Pudding – how to use up leftover bread

jeff 38 Comments

Savory Bread Pudding - A great way to use up leftover bread! | Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

When we wrote our first book we were testing dozens of loaves a week, and despite our healthy appetites, we just couldn’t consume all that we baked. Our neighbors were happy to take some of the bread, but there was more than a city block could consume, so we started making all kinds of recipes using up the leftovers. There are beautiful salads and puddings that are perfect for leftover (even stale) bread. In the New ABin5 we added this Savory Bread Pudding, which can be made with just about any loaf you bake. Well, I may have found the exception…I tried this recipe with some leftover Panettone and my very opinionated and vocal family requested that I not use that particular bread again for this. My husband described it as Thanksgiving stuffing, but richer. I liked it, but I was alone. The panettone does make exquisite sweet bread pudding however. They all agreed that peasant bread and/or challah is the way to go. The peasant and challah breads allow the flavors of the caramelized onions, spinach, spices and cheese to shine through. It is perfect for breakfast (a little bacon in the mix would be fabulous) or as a side dish with dinner.

This week I got a chance to bake with Elizabeth Ries and Chris Egert on KSTP-TV’s show Twin Cities Live. They are great sports and we had fun tossing pizzas together, one of them is a bit more skilled at the toss, but I won’t mention names.

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Baking in a Cloche

BreadIn5 561 Comments

Emile Henry Cloche 09

There are many ways to get a crusty loaf of bread, but one of our favorites is to use the tried and true method of baking in a clay cloche, here, the Emile Henry brand cloche. It is very similar to using a Dutch Oven, but the cloche was designed to bake bread, so it is an even more intuitive method. In other words, you aren’t lowering the bread into the piping hot vessel, you just lift the lid and slide the loaf onto what is essentially a baking stone. The cloche traps the steam from the dough to create a perfectly crisp and beautifully shiny crust, without having to add steam to the oven.

This loaf was made with the Master Recipe from The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: Read More