Jeffrey Hertzberg - Five minute bread: the revolutionary new baking method: no bread machine, no kneading!

Cookbook deals for unknown authors without TV shows are a long shot these days. On top of that, we knew bread baking, but we didnt know publishing. So we needed some luck, and some generous people to help us. Our most heartfelt thanks go to Ruth Cavin, our risk-taking editor at St. Martins Press, who heard us on the radio, liked our idea, and decided to publish us. Decisive is good. Otherwise this would still be just an eccentric family project. Lynne Rossetto Kasper took Jeffs call on her radio show, which gave us the opportunity to meet Ruth. Lynne also gave great advice and connected us with our top-notch literary agent, Jane Dystel.

We also had great friends and family to act as recipe testers. They baked endlessly and shared their criticism and praise with us. Once they started using our recipes, we understood that this would be a book for everyone avid bakers and non-bakers alike. That was a revelation. So we owe our book to them: Allison Campbell, Alex Cohn, Ralph Cohn, Shelly Fling, Paul Gates (whose home was the first proving ground), Ralph Gualtieri and Debora Villa (who carried our dough across international borders), Rachel Hertzberg and Julia Hertzberg (who proved that children could do our recipes), Jim and Theresa Murray, Lorraine Neal, Jennifer Sommerness and Laura Silver. In addition to testing the breads, experienced editors Allison, Shelly and Laura gave invaluable tips on the text itself. Thank you to Josh Manheimer, Dusti Kugler, Kelly Lainsbury, Craig Neal and Patricia Neal for lending their marketing expertise. Graham (Zos husband) gave us immeasurable moral support. And thanks to Fran Davis for allowing us to use nearly all the contents of her home as props for our photo shoots. Also thanks to Barb Davis for all of your support and to Laura Tiffany for opening your beautiful kitchen to us.

Gratitude to Zos colleagues from the culinary world who have served as mentors and shared their advice so generously: Stephen Durfee, Thomas Gumpel, Steven Brown, Raghavan Iyer, Suvir Saran and Andrew Zimmern.

ITS THE BREAD-MAKING REVOLUTION!
Only five minutes preparation
Just mix and refrigerate, then shape, leave to prove and cook
Freshly baked, crusty home-made bread, all week long!

It sounds too good to be true: irresistible home-made bread with no bread machine and only five minutes work! In Five Minute Bread, bakers Jeff Hertzberg and Zo Franois show you their simple, revolutionary bread-making method and over 80 recipes for using the basic dough.

From classic loaves such as Baguette, Ciabatta and Olive bread, through tasty ideas such as Italian semolina bread, to sweet breads like Brioche and Sticky pecan caramel rolls, the recipes are quick and straightforward.

With troubleshooting tips, baking facts and its easy-to-follow method, Five Minute Bread will inspire you to make fresh bread every day of the week, with minimal fuss and effort.

Jeff Hertzberg has been a physician, university professor, information technology consultant and ardent amateur baker. He developed a love of great bread while growing up in New York City, and refined this love with extensive travel through Europe and North Africa. He lives in Minnesota with his wife and two daughters.

Zo Franois is a pastry chef and baker trained at the Culinary Institute of America. In addition to teaching baking and pastry and consulting to restaurants, Zo creates desserts and custom wedding cakes. She lives in Minnesota with her husband and two sons.

Refrigerating Pre-Mixed Home-Made Dough

Like most kids, my brother and I loved sweets, so dessert was our favourite time of day. Wed sit in the kitchen, devouring frosted supermarket doughnuts.

Those are too sweet, my grandmother would say. Me, Id rather have a piece of good rye bread, with cheese on it.

Munch, munch, munch. Our mouths were full; we could not respond.

Its better than cake, shed say.

Theres a certain solidarity among kids gorging on sweets, but secretly, I knew she was right. I could finish half a loaf of very fresh, very crisp rye bread by myself, with or without butter (unlike my grandmother, I considered cheese to be a distraction from perfect rye bread). The right stuff came from a little bakery on Horace Harding Boulevard in Queens. The shop itself was nondescript, but the breads were eastern European masterpieces. The crust of the rye bread was crisp, thin and caramelised brown. The interior crumb was moist, dense and chewy, and bursting with tangy yeast, rye and wheat flavours. It made great toast, too and yes, it was better than cake.

The handmade bread was available all over New York City, and it wasnt a rarefied delicacy. Everyone knew what it was and took it for granted. It was not a stylish addition to affluent lifestyles; it was a simple comfort food brought here by modest immigrants.

I left New York in the late 1980s, and assumed that the corner bread shops would always be there, waiting for me, whenever I came back to visit. But I was wrong. As people lost interest in making a second stop after the supermarket just for bread, the shops gradually faded away. By 1990, the ubiquitous corner shops turning out great eastern, central and southern European breads with crackling crusts were no longer so ubiquitous.

Great European breads, handmade by artisans, were still available, but theyd become part of the serious (and seriously expensive) food phenomenon that had swept the country. The bread bakery was no longer on every corner now it was a destination. And nobodys grandmother would ever have paid six dollars for a loaf of bread.

Id fly back to New York and wander the streets, bereft (well, not really). My shop on Horace Harding Boulevard had changed hands several times by 1990, and the bread, being made only once a day, was dry and didnt really have a lot of flavour. I even became convinced that we could get better bagels in Minneapolis and from a supermarket. Things were that grim.

So Zo and I decided to do something about it. Five Minute Bread is our attempt to help people re-create the great ethnic breads of years past, in their own homes, without investing serious time in the process. Using our straightforward, fast and easy recipes, anyone will be able to create artisan bread and pastry at home with minimal equipment. Our first problem was: who has time to make bread every day?

After years of experimentation, it turns out that we do, and with a method as fast as ours, you can, too. We solved the time problem and produced top-quality artisan loaves without a bread machine. We worked out the master recipes during busy years of career transition and starting families (our kids now delight in the pleasures of home-baked bread). Our lightning-fast method lets us find the time to bake great bread every day. We developed this method to recapture the daily artisan bread experience without further crunching our limited time and it works!

Traditional breads need a lot of attention, especially if you want to use a starter for that natural, tangy taste. Starters need to be cared for, with water and flour replenished from time to time. Dough needs to be kneaded until resilient, set to rise, punched down, allowed to rise again. There are boards and pans and utensils galore to be washed, some of which cant go into the dishwasher. Very few busy people can go through this every day, if ever. Even if your friends are all food fanatics, when was the last time you had home-made bread at a dinner party?