Jeff Hertzberg M.D. - The Best of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: Favorite Recipes from BreadIn5

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To our readers who told us the real secret: which breads they bake every day.

Jeff

To the BreadIn5 community of bakers who shared their love of baking with us over the years.

Zo

This has been a long and wonderful road, stretching back over fifteen years, and that gives us a lot of people to thank. First, thanks to Peter Wolverton, our editor at St. Martins Press, for another great effort, and for supporting our seven previous titles. Lynne Rossetto Kasper took Jeffs call (a thinly veiled book pitch) on The Splendid Table radio show in 2000, and the late great Ruth Cavin, our very first editor, asked for a book proposal based on little more than faith and intuition.

Our wonderful literary agent, Jane Dystel, and her fantastic teamMiriam Goderich and Lauren Abramoshepherded our books here in the United States, and introduced them to readers in Britain, Germany, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Jeff Lin of BustOutSolutions.com maintains our website, where we have the privilege of connecting directly with our readers.

Bill Hanes, Kelly Olson, and Linda Nelson of Red Star Yeast have been great believers in our method, ever since Bill and Kelly saw our demo at a Milwaukee book signing, and embarked on a long partnership, helping us get the word out about fast yeasted breads. Peggy Orenstein, Beth Fouhy, and Danny Sager have helped us navigate the magical world of literary public relations ever since our first bookwe wouldnt be here without them. Hannah Smith, Ph.D., helped us understand the biology of yeast, Alexandra Cohn critiqued our rye breads, and Riv-Ellen Prell and Steven Foldes did the same for challahs. The great team at Craftsy (now MyBlueprint.com) produced Zos fabulous instructional video, Artisan Bread in Minutes.

It really takes a village to raise a cookbook. Friends lent Herculean talents and support: Jen Sommerness; Craig and Patricia Neal; Lorraine Neal; Leslie Bazzett; Jay, Tracey, Gavin, and Megan Berkowitz; the late Sarah Berkowitz; the late Barbara Neal; Marion and John Callahan; Barb Davis; Fran Davis; Anna and Ewart Franois; Kathy Kasnoff and Lyonel Norris; Andy Small; Andrew Hachiya; Troy Meyers; Kristin Neal and Bill Friedman; Carey, Heather, and Victoria Neal; Sally Simmons and David van de Sande; and Amy Vang.

Gratitude to colleagues in our baking and culinary adventures past and present: Robin Asbell; Steven Brown of Tilia and St. Genevieve; Adam Cohn of Adam Cohn Law; Abby Dodge; Stephen Durfee of the Culinary Institute of America; Barbara Fenzl of Les Gourmettes Cooking School; Michelle Gayer of The Salty Tart; Dorie Greenspan; Thomas Gumpel; P. J. Hamel and Jeffrey Hamelman of King Arthur Baking Company; Bill Hanes, Kelly Olson, and Linda Nelson of Red Star Yeast; Kim Harbinson; Molly Herrmann of Kitchen in the Market; Ragavan Iyer (who sat down with Zo in 2005 and explained how the publishing world really works); Dusti Kugler, Kelly Lainsbury, and Madeline Hill of Food Works; Brenda Langton of Spoonriver restaurant and the Minneapolis Bread Festival; Kevin Masse of The FeedFeed; Tracy Morgan; Silvana Nardone; Stephanie Meyer of FreshTart.com; Riad Nasr, Karl Benson, and Marie Dwyer at Cooks of Crocus Hill; Peter Reinhart; the entire team at Quang; Suvir Saran and Charlie Burd of American Masala; Eliza Woolston Sheffield and Ann Moth of Blue Star Cooking; Tara Steffen of Emile Henry; Jamie Schler; Maria Speck; Joy Summers; and Andrew Zimmern.

Sarah Kieffer has created beautiful content for our website since 2012 and has led us through the crazy world of social mediayet another great way to connect with our readers. Sarahs aesthetic can be seen in her work as our photo and food stylist during the photo shoots for the books. Stephen Grosss photography made all of our breads come to life on the page and depicted the beauty of each recipe.

Graham Franois (Zos husband) created our fabulous website, BreadIn5 .com, and Laura Silver (Jeffs wife) made sure that St. Martin's Press got manuscripts that were already vetted by an experienced editor. And of course, thanks to our kids: Rachel and Julia (Jeffs), and Henri and Charlie (Zos), for whom its been a lifetime of testing and tasting. Our two little ones, who fostered our first conversations about bread, are now both college students.

And no acknowledgment would be complete if we didnt thank each otherfor being great friends and colleagues for eighteen years.

It is so easy to have freshly baked bread when you want it, with only ve minutes a day of active effort. First, mix the ingredients into a container all at once, and then let them sit for two hours. Now you are ready to shape and bake the bread, or you can refrigerate the dough and use it over the next couple of weeks. Yes, weeks! Each recipe makes enough dough for many loaves. When you want fresh-baked bread, take a piece of the dough from the container and shape it into a loaf. Let it rest for twenty minutes or more, and then bake. Your house will smell like a bakery and your family and friends will love you for it.

There is a certain nobility in a Best of book. It is implicit. You must have a wealth of material, a rabid fan base, the respect of the industry, the admiration of your peers, and a track record of excellence over a considerable length of time. And you must have given it your all. Dolly Partons Greatest Hits would be a bad joke if she had been a one-hit wonder. Instead, she has several volumes of hits, and for what its worth, she wrote Jolene and I Will Always Love You in the same day. She is singular. An only. And thats better than best.

What Zo and Jeff have done with the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes series is prove that the worlds easiest yeasted loaf, the most versatile bread dough recipe (even pizza!), can be taken in so many directions and have so many applications that it has created a series of hits, launched a gazillion home bakers on their own bread journey, and spawned, finally, a Best of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which you are reading right now. This series redefined bread baking for America, long before the Covid-19 sourdough craze. This series of books launched on a simple premise: bread baking can be easy, simple, and anyone can do it. Then it took offand took on healthy breads, hydration ratios, flatbreads, gluten-free breads, holiday breads, pizza, and more. Thats what happens in our culture: Success breeds more success and, in this case, more books.

One of my favorite quotes, and I wish I knew who to attribute it to, says:

There are a lot of rewards for doing good work.

The main reward is the chance to do more good work.

So be sure the work you are doing is the work you want to do.

Because they are going to ask you for more.

And here is a result of doing all that good work: a Best-of book. The contents are superb, the recipes are absolute, the organization and learning gets better with every volume. But I have temporarily been distracted; let me get back to my point. Its always better to be the only than to be the best. To truly celebrate what Jeff and Zo have accomplished with this milestone edition is to demonstrate their singularity. Best is relative. Only is absolute.