Too Good to Be True?

Lured by the promise of instant fresh-baked bread, I tried the "Simply Crust Bread" from Hertzbert and Francois's Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery that Revolutionized Home Baking (St. Martin's Press, $27.95). Reading the title takes longer than mixing up the batch!

The Secret is a stash of premixed, prerisen, high-moisture dough in your refrigerator: a vat of it, ready to go at a moment's notice. Well, not quite. I manage to spend an entire week-end on this project. My family got impatient, but in the world of fresh bread, this method is pretty fast, once you get the dough in the fridge.

This recipe yields four pounds of very wet dough, which doesn't require kneading, a time-saver right there. After it's risen, only bake what you need for one meal, and store the rest. (However, it can't go from fridge to oven; allow about an hour for chilled dough to warm to room temperature.)

To make the dough, mix 1 1/2 Tablespoons active dry yeast into 1 1/2 Tablespoons coarse salt into 3 cups lukewarm water.

Then mix in 6 1/2 cups flour. I used bread flour. The dough will be loose and wet.

Cover and let rise, 2 to 5 hours.

You can bake the dough without refrigerating it first, of course, but I got a late start on Saturday, It wasn't risen in time to bake for
Saturday evening supper, so we had cornbread instead.

I shifted everything around in the fridge to make room for four pounds of bread dough and planned to bake it for Sunday night. However, we ended up having a very late dinner, waiting around for dough to warm up enough to bake and then for bread to cool enough to cut.

Several hours before you actually need bread, cut off a hunk of your chilled dough. It should be around a pound; I weighed mine, but I'm like that. The recipe says your hunk should be about the size of a cantaloupe.

Place the dough in a greased bread pan or form into a round loaf and let it rest on a cornmeal-sprinkled pizza peel. The dough's yeast cells need about an hour to wake up from their suspended animation and get the dough ready for baking. Right before you slide it into the oven, dust with flour and slash the top with a serrated knife.

Put a broiler pan in the bottom of the oven. Preheat it, the oven and baking stone, if you're using one, to 450 degrees.

Here's the fun part. As soon as you slide the dough in the oven, pour a cup of water into the broiler pan and shut the door, fast. This steams up the oven and give the bread a hard crust. Bake 30 minutes and cool completely before slicing.

We like this bread alot; it had a great crust, good flavor, and a light texture. It was chewy, and even chewier as leftovers. I baked bread from the fridge vat every few days, and my later efforts had a mild sourdough tang, which was nice.

The Bessing of the Nile

Bread wasn't always a plastic-wrapped squishy white loaf or even a brick-oven baked baguette. According to Reay Tannahill in Food in History, the best cook-out side dish a Neolithic homemaker could offer was unleavened flatbread, baked on a hot stone. A gritty, high-fiber griddlecake -- obvious from the worn-down teeth found in fossil skulls. That early baker didn't lack leavening agents: the problem was with the grain.

Wheat had to be toasted (parched) before thrashing it, or the seed would not separate from the husk. But parching the wheat destroyed the gluten-forming proteins. These proteins, in contact with yeast, produce air bubbles, then rising, and then a light porous loaf.

However, Praise Geb! (Egyptian god of the earth), a momentous event occured at the beginning of the Egyptian dynastic period. A new wheat strain appeared, which could be threshed without toasting it first. A luxury item was born: raised bread.

Today is a cold, but sunny, Saturday, and I'm planning to bake. And as the smell of fresh bread fills my house, I'll think on the Nile.

Bread is your Friend

Bread's my favorite food. And writing's my favorite job.

But I've exiled myself from bread over the past few years (evil carbs!), and this winter I've hit my first writer's block. The solution to the later is getting behind a worthwhile new project, and what would be more worthwhile than reconciling with my old friend, Bread?

I plan to work my way through some bread classics, reflect on this most basic food, and mix in historical trivia, delicious tidbits, and nutrition facts along the way.

All bakers know that bread is forgiving and loves us; I suspect it's a great teacher about life and art, as well.