This recipe is from the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois – or ABin5 as its online shorthand has evolved to. The book has been on our shelf for almost a year, and I’m only now delving into it. You can’t actually make bread in five...

We got together with Sarah’s family and decided to take bread as a gift. I’m confident with Reinhart’s lean bread recipe now, so that was a given; but I acquired some new bannetons to try out my shaping skills with. The one I have been using at home is for much bigger loaves...

The lean bread recipe from Reinhart is now my favorite bread. In this batch I used instant yeast rather than active dry, and it made a real flavor difference – the smell and flavor of the yeast was definitely there adding a nice layer to the experience. My shaping this time was better...

In Sunday’s San Francisco Baking Institute class we made olive sourdough, rye and semolina loaves. Like Saturday, I made fifteen loaves of bread but am only counting it as three. We had measured all our dry ingredients out on Saturday afternoon, so we were able to jump right into...

My sourdough class is another two weeks away, but I thought I’d try another loaf with my starter (which I’ve been feeding and keeping alive in the fridge). I used the same recipe from Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day that I used for Loaf 15, and the resulting failure was...

As the first step in my new Scientific Method for Learning How to Bake Great Bread (there is no acronym for this), I’m comparing the three flours that I’ve been using – Whole Foods Organic, King Arthur, and Gold Medal. I made three versions of 1/3 size batches of the French...

This is a follow-up attempt from Loaf 11, my French baguettes that only tasted okay. This time I used the same recipe, but corrected what I thought were the errors from last time. The dough came out too sticky again, so I added a bit more flour until it became tacky. I handled the dough more...

I tried this loaf again. The results were a bit better, but still far from right. This time I mixed the ingredients the minimum amount to get them blended with the seeds worked in, this amounted to about 10 minutes less kneading of the dough. In addition to being faster and easier, the dough...