"Zoe Francois" news and stories

A year ago, I was totally swept along by the No-Knead bread tide. I thought it was the best thing ever and would often sing the praises of the technique, because for the first time in my life, I was able to make good bread easily. The only problem with it was that you had to be careful of the timing of when you started the bread, because of the specific waiting periods required.

Luckily for me, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François have solved the timing problem by devising an even easier way of making good, fresh bread at home and they've written a cookbook called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day devoted to their method. They developed a wet dough that can be kept in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. What you do is simply cut off a chunk of dough and bake it off each day as needed. That way one night you can bake up a larger loaf if you're having guests for dinner and the next day, you can just bake off the little bit you need for your afternoon sandwich.

In addition to the standard loaf, Zoë has created an assortment of recipes that allow you to take the basic bread dough and turn it into all sorts of breads from sweet rolls to seeded loaves. The book is written clearly and the recipes are easy to follow. There aren't a ton of pictures, but what are there are gorgeous.

I've personally made several batches of the dough and it's turned out perfectly each time. I even let a batch of dough hang out in my fridge for a full two weeks, to determine if it really was still usable after all that time and discovered that the bread that baked up from that older dough was wonderful, with a distinct sour taste that reminded me of the sourdough I occasionally buy from a local bakery.

One final note about this book is that it is accompanied by an informative website that includes questions from readers and answers from the authors, a section devoted to clearing up an errors in the book and videos of Jeff and Zoe in baking action.

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