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.