One of the very best things I received as a gift has been Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. I adore baguettes and ciabatta more than most things, and have relied on those Take and Bake loaves they sell in grocery stores for more than a decade. Well, NO MORE.
The recipes in Artisan Bread are awesome for me, because I am incredibly impatient and imprecise. With these recipes, you just throw ingredients into your mixer (I also received a KitchenAid stand mixer as a gift from my parents. I'm so happy to say I use it weekly, and it's covered in flour on a regular basis) and mostly forget about it for a couple hours. I've since acquired professional baking sheets and silpat that no one else in my household is allowed to touch, a pizza stone, and purchased one of those plastic Sterlite shoebox bins specifically to store dough in (maybe a dough rising bin will be a next purchase).
From the book, I've basically used four or five pages. The recipe and instructions for a basic boule, then the instructions to use boule dough to make a baguette, ciabatta, and pita bread:
Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread
(adapted from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day)3/4 c. lukewarm water
3/4 c. lukewarm milk
3/4 Tbsp. granulated yeast (1 packet)
1/4 c. honey
3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
Mix these together then add
3 1/3 c. whole wheat flour
Mix until completely incorporated into a sticky dough with your stand mixer's dough hook or food processor's dough attachment. This will take a couple of minutes. You might need to scrape the sides of the bowl down.
Leave dough in the bowl and mostly cover (I use saran wrap, but leave a gap to let the dough breathe) for 2 hours. If you're not going to bake immediately, after this initial rise period, you can store the dough in the fridge in a lidded (but not airtight) container.
When you're ready to bake, prep your loaf pan with some nonstick spray, sprinkle the dough and quickly shape it into a loaf by gathering the sides of the dough to the bottom. Pull the sides to the bottom, rotate the dough, and do it again until it looks smooth on top. I keep my hands floury so I don't accumulate too much sticky dough on my fingers as I do this. I also try to shape it into an oval or football shape so when I drop it into the loaf pan, it takes up most of it. If there's a gap at one end or the other, that's okay. You're going to dust the top of the dough with a little more flour and then give it a couple of shallow slashes with a serrated knife.
Let it rise another hour to hour and a half. The cookbook says 1 hr 40 min. I let mine go just over an hour, and it passed being a lovely rounded loaf to looking a bit like an inverted flat tire. You'll know when it looks like you should throw it into the oven.
Have your oven preheated to 350. Since you're not using a pizza stone, you can pretty much bake as soon as your oven gets to temperature. Bake for 45 min-1 hour. Again, you'll know when it looks right. The longer you keep it in, the more deeply it will brown (until it, you know, burns). Let it cool a little and turn it out of the pan. It will nearly kill you, but for best results, let it cool completely before cutting it into slices. After I've sliced it, we actually keep ours in the freezer in a ziploc and take out individual slices each morning to toast. It's very wheaty, a little crumbly, but hearty and delicious. And we have only purchased a single loaf of bread in the past five months.
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