Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day

(review by Deanna)

Artisan Bread is a cookbook that teaches you to bake bread on a daily basis with minimal effort.

The method is really great.  It works and the results are delicious - like the table bread from a nice restaurant. When the weather was cool, I was baking bread with several meals a week and had no complaints.  It really does take only five minutes a day.  Even the "twenty minute" setup day for making the dough is easy, probably taking even less than twenty minutes. There is something really delightful about being able to bake restaurant quality bread using a manageable routine. 

If there are any "catches" with the method, they are the waiting times.  On dough making day, you need to be able to leave the dough out for two to five hours, then refrigerate it.  On baking days, the dough needs to rest at room temperature for around an hour before baking so even though the involvement time is only five minutes, you have to start a little early.  These don't make it at all difficult, they just create a scheduling requirement. 

This is a cookbook I actually read cover to cover.  I'm not sure why, as it was extremely repetitive.  My only complaint about the book itself is that while the method is the same for each bread, all the details are repeated in each recipe.  It makes it difficult to scan for any variations to the basic method from one recipe to the next. 

Although I'll be taking a break from daily baking over the summer, I will use it periodically and go back to several times a week in the fall. This is quite a good cookbook and I recommend it.