Five Minutes? Really?

Last month while Lauren and I were down in Seattle at The Lab doing some book chatting, we took our regularly scheduled trip to Elliot Bay Books. Mmmm books. Because I had indulged in more than my share of spending the day before at Anthropologie (damn I'm a sucker for that place), I held back from picking up a copy of the ever-so compelling Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day in favour of taking it out of the library when I got home and giving it a good trial run before I made a purchase. I often do this with cookbooks, as one can only tell so much from reading recipes vs. actually cooking with them, and my cookbook collection would otherwise tend to grow a bit of out control. Plus, I was kind of unsure about the whole "artisan" in five minutes a day concept to be honest. I count myself amongst the snobbier of bread consumers and wasn't sure this would really measure up. I had to wait in a queue at the library and the book came up a week or so ago. I dove right in and tried out the basic recipe. Now, to be honest, after spending on evening flipping through the book, I actually didn't think that trying out the basic recipe was going to give me what it did. I thought the basic recipe, which has its own little section at the beginning of the book, was kind of like the sponge or base you'd begin with and that I'd be able to throw some whole wheat or (my favourite) rye flour in there to make a more interesting loaf. Turns out no. If you want to make rye bread, you use the rye dough, if you want multigrain, use the multigrain dough, etc. While this seems really obvious in the retelling, it didn't at the time. The book was structured to devote a whole intro chapter to this basic recipe and then the rest of the book is devoted to other breads. I guess I just made some faulty assumptions there, but I was kind of bummed when I went to bake a less "white" bread the next day and discovered that I was already locked into a specific recipe. So be warned. The bread itself? Well I suspect it's a lot like the no knead bread that made the internet rounds. That seems to be what they're getting at (they stress that you should not knead the dough) and while I never made the no knead bread, I did eat it somewhere and it was quite similar. I've so far only tried the one basic recipe (we went away so I abandoned my bread making for a bit there) and it was fine. Not nearly as good as the recipes coming out of Local Breads, but really much, much less time consuming. I adore my copy of Local Breads, (as I've said before I read it before bed and dream of bread making), but I don't often have the time to be home to engage with the bread during its various rising/proofing stages. I'm eager to try the other 5 minute bread recipes and see if they sell me a bit more on the book and concept. We're talking about following the path laid out in Babara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in September and eating more locally. Not quite a 100 Mile Diet kind of a thing, but a definite local focus/local challenge. Like Kingsolver, we're going to have exceptions and one of ours may be flour so that I can make all our bread. We'll see though, we're still working it out as a family.

Comments

[renee]

Hmm, I just ordered this through Amazon, thinking my mr. would like it (he loves making beer bread, so other quick recipes seemed like a good idea.)
With your description though, I'm not sure how that'll work out.