The easiest artisan loaf you will ever bake.
With just 4 ingredients, 5 minutes of active prep time, and ready to serve in under 4 hours, this recipe is sure to impress anyone who eats with you!
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Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D. and Zoe Francois is an amazing, and amazingly simple, way to kick start your bread making. Hertzeberg and Francois have pioneered a fuss-free bread making process that requires minimal hands-on baking time (you guessed it, about five minutes) and yields maximum flavor. And even better – most recipes yield enough dough to make multiple loaves, and that dough can be stored in the fridge for two weeks or longer so you can bake it whenever you are ready for it. If you were to buy one book on bread baking, it should be this one.
The recipe I’m sharing here is my modification of their Artisan Loaf. In Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, Hertzberg and Francois share an Artisan Loaf recipe that yields 3 or 4 loaves of bread. They recommend storing the dough in the fridge for up to two weeks, and the longer it is stored, the more dense and sour the dough becomes. It is not a true sourdough, but it takes on a more sour flavor as the dough sits in the fridge. In my family, though, we tend to prefer a lighter, springier texture in our loaves. We like the way the dough tastes when first mixed, and since we don’t often need three artisan loaves at once, I came up with this modification to create one single loaf.
Gear up.
This process is simple, and can be done with equiment you probably already have in your kitchen. You can get by with a glass mixing bow, a wooden spoon (or your hands!) to mix the dough together, and a sturdy baking sheet to bake the loaf. However, for best results, you may want to check out a few specialized tools. I use this food-grade lidded storage container and this Danish dough whisk to mix my dough together. I especially like the dough whisk because the shape of the head makes it easy to mix together heavy or dense doughs without overmixing and ending up with a tough finished product. You will also want to bake your loaf on a hot baking stone, and it is helpful, though not essential, to have a pizza peel to transfer your dough into the oven.
Get baking.
If your goal is to have fresh bread on the table for dinner, the first thing you need to consider is timing. This recipe can be done in between 3.5 and 4 hours. Try to give yourself at least 4 hours if you can, but know that it will be out of the oven in just over 3 hours if you need to travel with a hot loaf to a friend’s house for dinner. I promise that friend will be very impressed when you show up with a still-steaming loaf of fresh baked bread.
Ingredients:
2 round cups unbleached all purpose flour
1 and ½ teaspoons instant yeast
1 and ½ teaspoons kosher salt
1 cup warm (approximately 100 degrees Farenheit) water
Steps:
Add yeast and salt to the bottom of your large lidded bowl.
Pour in water, swirl it around gently to incorporate yeast and salt.
Add the flour.
Mix the dough together with dough whisk (or wooden spoon, or lightly with your hands if you’d prefer - but do not knead!) until dough is uniformly moist. The ideal dough will be thick and a little sticky. You are not looking for a smooth, uniform dough like traditional yeast breads.
Cover your dough bucket with the lid popped slightly open - do not seal the lid. Let the dough rise for 2 hours in a warm place. It will double in size or more.
Prepare your pizza peel (a smooth cutting board can also do the trick here) by liberally sprinkling flour (or course grit cornmeal, if you have some on hand) on the peel. The dough will rest on the flour for the second rise. This will make it easier to move the dough from the peel onto the stone at baking time.
After the first rise, you will carefully scoop the dough out of the bowl (do not punch it down, remove it gently) and form it into a ball by tucking the edges down as shown in the video below. Sprinkle flour on the surface of the dough as needed to keep it from getting sticky in your hands, and shape the dough into a ball by grabbing the sides and tucking them down on the bottom of the ball until you see a round shape and the dough is fairly smooth. This is the trickiest part to explain, so there is a simple video below for all you visual learners!
Set the dough ball on the floured surface to rest for 20 minutes.
Prep your stove. While the dough is resting, preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. When you turn the oven on, make sure your baking stone is on a rack in the middle of the oven, and place a baking sheet on the lowest rack. The stone and baking sheet should warm up along with the oven.
After 20 minutes, score the top of the loaf with a sharp serrated knife by gently slicing a “X”, a few lines, or whatever design you like on the top of your loaf.
Slide the loaf off the pizza peel and onto the hot baking stone. Pour 1 cup of water onto the baking sheet below the stone (this will create steam in the oven to yield a nice crisp crust) and close the oven door. Bake for 30 minutes. Do not open the oven door again until the bread is done. When you open the door, allow the steam to vent out for a moment before reaching in, it can get very hot!
Remove the bread, let it cool, and dig in! Bread is always easiest to slice at room temperature and takes about an hour to cool fully. But I’ve been known to cut into mine after as little as 20 minutes if need be!
This video shows steps 7 and 8, above.
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day goes into a lot of helpful detail about every step of this process, so if any of this seems confusing you should pick up a copy. If you do grab the book, I highly recommend the “Soft American-Style White Bread” in the “Enriched Breads” chapter. That’s the loaf I’ve made more than any other since moving to North Carolina in 2023.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be working on a video tutorial that will walk you through every step of the process. It is easier than it looks! I would love to hear from you if you try out the recipe, or if you pick up the book and try any of the other variations. Until the video tutorial is ready, I’m dropping a message box below. If you have any questions or need one-on-one help with your loaf, feel free to reach out and I will get back to you ASAP!
