Zoe and I will be in select newspapers all over the United States this Sunday, November 14. Our flyer will have a Red Star Yeast coupon, and links to their site with video and both our Master recipes (whole grain and white). If we’re not in your city this Sunday, you can still see the video and recipes (but not get the coupon) at breadin5minutes.com.
We’ve been baking with Red Star for as long as we’ve been baking (40 person-years?), and have been doing events with Red Star for almost a year now– great product, consistent results, and available in many forms (packets, jars, and bulk all over the place). Check out my post about our neck-tag on the Red Star yeast bottles.
You can mix our doughs in a big bucket with a Danish dough whisk, which is our standard, or you can mix in a stand mixer. The bucket’s great, because it’s one less thing to wash, but some people find that it is easier to make the doughs in a mixer and then transfer them. Either way produces wonderful dough…
In this video: some tricks for mixing up Brioche that are even faster than what’s in the books. The mini versions are wonderful because they take a fraction of the time to rest and bake, and make perfect soft buns for dinner. Or spread them with preserves for breakfast.
Panini (singular panino) are mouthwatering Italian grilled sandwiches. They’re closely related to the French “croque monsieur,” but they’re made with olive oil rather than melted butter. You can put anything you want into them, so long as one of the ingredients is cheese, which ties the whole thing together.
Why not make them with the best bread you can find (your own of course)? First make some bread from any lean dough (white flour recipe, or a whole grain version), then come back here to fire up the panini press (you’ll see in some of my pictures that I used a mixture of doughs). One nice thing is that the bread doesn’t have to be absolutely fresh to make a crisp and crunchy panino, so this can be a great way to use up yesterday’s loaf… Read More
Well it is official, our readers are as obsessed about bread as we are. I know this because so many of you watched a video about dough rising! In fact, I did this post to satisfy the folks using our gluten-free chapter from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day and their desire to see the dough in action. I mix up a batch, let it rise, shape and then bake it. Handling the gluten-free dough is very different then our other recipes, so I hope having a video will be helpful.
We have you mix up your dough in a nice big 6-Quart Food-Storage Container, because over the course of 2 hours it will grow to nearly touch the lid. Some folks have asked exactly what that should look like, so I mixed up a batch of each Master recipe from ABin5 and HBin5, then sat back and watched them rise. I promise this is more fun than watching paint dry, it will show you exactly what your dough should look like and I’ve set it to a little Johnny Cash (Ooops, apparently I can’t do that. Had to switch to something with a little less….copyright).
We also have an exciting announcement to make, especially for those Brits who are baking our bread or people excited to bake with weights.
Our first book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day was translated for British bakers. Yes, it is still in English, but the recipes are converted to weights. They appear in both ounces and metrics. For those of you Americans excited to bake by weights this will be a welcome edition. The book’s title and look are also changed, but the recipes are the same. Five Minute Bread is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.UK and will be on bookstore shelves in January 2011.
People think of artisan-style loaves as being free-form, but my high-moisture, stored-dough method also works beautifully in loaf pans. Read on to hear more about getting great results with traditional un-coated loaf pans.
In the books, I’ve tended to be on the careful side about loaf pans. Since this dough is so wet, I recommended non-stick pans and even so, to grease them well. Yet a very heavyweight aluminum pan works beautifully too– all you have to do is grease it well (I like olive oil even for American-style breads but you can use any liquid or solid shortening you like):
… and be sure the formed dough is well dusted with flour before putting it into the pan— it shouldn’t feel all sticky as it goes in. If it does stick a bit, just let it sit for 10 minutes after taking it out of the oven and it will “steam” itself out. I love this pan, and when I say it’s heavyweight, I mean it. The pan weighs a full pound…
This was a big loaf 2 pounds, 5 ounces of dough, using my Master Recipe. Loaves this large need to rest for 90 minutes after shaping, and they tend to need extra time in the oven. For this size, a lean dough needs 45 to 60 minutes at 450 degrees F, and enriched doughs will need about an hour at 350. Or more. If you’re finding that there’s over-browning or scorching in your oven at this temp, try again 25 degrees lower (Fahrenheit) and increase the bake-time by 10 or 15%. Go by the loaf color and the firmness of the crust:
A reader recently asked about REALLY big loaves, in a 16-inch long pan (but still 4 inches by 4 inches h*w), in a pan like this one. That’ll work too, but you need a lot of dough: 54 ounces / 1530 grams, almost a full batch of my Master recipe. Have a great fall, and follow on Twitter, and on Facebook too…
Red Star Yeast (Lesaffre Corp) sponsored this post, and supplied yeast for recipe testing.
Note: BreadIn5.com is reader supported. When you buy through links on the site, BreadIn5 LLC earns commissions.
Istanbul, Greece, Naples, Rome and all the stops between were beyond my wildest expectations, but this pizza oven is where I fell in love. I rented a particular house in Tuscany, not for its stunning views, or proximity to wine, cheese, olive oil, gelato, pasta, pastries, all of which were minutes away, but for this oven. For the first three weeks of our journey we ate hundreds of pizzas and flatbreads, as research for our upcoming book on the subject, and now, in Tuscany I finally got back in the kitchen to do a little creating of my own. With a bit of help from David, our trusted culinary guide and keeper of the oven, I set out to bake pizza in Italy, an admittedly ballsy move. Read More
This Labor Day weekend is summer’s last hurrah for those of us in Minnesota (more on that in a minute). I’m just back from a fantastic camping trip, and as always, we did our flatbread in a cast-iron or other heavy skillet, right on the camping stove (I’ve always used the Coleman). You can use any lean dough, either from The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, or from The New Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Your skillet must have a cover, but that’s about all the equipment you’ll need. This is pretty similar to the naan we do in Artisan Bread, and at this link here on the website.
We Minnesotans pride ourselves on taking winter in stride. The other thing we seem to have pride in is the shape of our state– it seems to work its way into road signs and even macaroni and cheese pasta shapes. So with great delight, I reveal to you: grilled bread in THE SHAPE OF MINNESOTA:
OK, it was an accident. My wife claims that this does not really resemble the state:
Well, use a little poetic license, especially for the Arrowhead region? Other posts on grilled or summer breads are at: Read More
I’ve been collecting pizza stones in order to recommend the best ones to you and because I have never met a piece of kitchen equipment I could resist. I have been surprised by some and disappointed by others. Here is my review…the stones are in random order. Read More
First off, sorry for the loud cricket sounds– couldn’t do anything about that, because…
It’s still summer, and I’m still grilling bread, but I wanted to show how to roll dough exceptionally thin for crackers use the outdoor grill as an oven. The key with crackers is to prevent them from getting scorched. In Artisan Bread in Five and Healthy Bread in Five we talk about doing crackers at in the 375 – 400 degree F. range (190 – 200 C), and that definitely helps prevent scorching. You can also use oil on the crackers, and that helps too. But oil does increase the baking time– my crackers took 20 to 30 minutes to get crisp. And that range depends on whether you get them truly paper-thin. The thicker ones take a little longer. So be more patient than I am and get it to less than 1/16-inch thickness– you should almost be able to see through it.
One other tip: If you bake large flat crackers and don’t cut them before baking, “dock” (puncture) them with a fork before baking or they might puff, which you don’t want with pita.
The idea of crackers has always to have a crisp dried result that stored well– as you can see in the video, these didn’t last long enough to test the theory. And remember: serious bakers wear closed-toe footwear!
and their desire to see the dough in action. I mix up a batch, let it rise, shape and then bake it. Handling the gluten-free dough is very different then our other recipes, so I hope having a video will be helpful.
