Free Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day: 100 New Recipes Featuring Whole Grains, Fruits, Vegetables, and Gluten-Free Ingredients by Zoe Francois, Jeff Hertzberg MD

of parchment paper, cover it loosely with plastic wrap, and put it back in the refrigerator, where it will sit for at least 8 hours and up to 14 hours. The dough will spread slightly, and may not seem to have risen at all. Don’t panic, it will still have lovely oven spring. Because you don’t handle the dough at all after the refrigerator rise, the bubbles in the dough will remain intact.
Right before dinner , uncover your dough and allow it to rest at room temperature while your oven preheats to the recommended temperature with a stone set on the middle rack. When the oven is hot, slash the loaf as you normally would, and bake as directed in the recipe.
    “MY BREAD IS EITHER TOO SALTY OR NOT SALTY ENOUGH! HOW DO I ADJUST THE RECIPES?”
    The recipes in the book were tested with Morton brand kosher salt (for adjustments if you use other kinds of salt; it’s the coarseness that varies). Readers of our first book will notice that the recipes are a little less salty than they were in Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. The amounts we settled on were pleasing to us and to our testers, with a fairly typical salt level compared to most of the recipes used by home bakers. But you can adjust the salt to suit your own taste. If you find our recipes too salty, decrease the salt by 25 to 50 percent and see what you think. Below that threshold most but not all people will find the bread flat-tasting (the texture will be different as well). People accustomed to a low-salt diet can decrease the salt all the way to zero (or use potassium-based salt substitutes—).
    If you find our recipes too bland, you can adjust the salt upward, by 25 to 50 percent. Beyond that the salt will begin to inhibit the action of the yeast and your breads won’t rise well.
    “CAN I DECREASE THE YEAST IN THE RECIPES?”
    Some readers asked us whether our technique works with less yeast. Why? Experienced sourdough bakers sometimes prefer the more delicate flavor of a dough risen with less packaged yeast. Some traditionalists believe that rising the dough very slowly, with very little packaged yeast, builds better flavor.
    We weren’t convinced of this when we wrote Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day —many of our busy readers value the quicker rise that you get when you use the 1½ tablespoons of yeast called for in our recipes. And we think that our flavor is pretty darn good, especially when the dough ages a day or two.
    But if you have more time, our recipes work beautifully with less yeast. We tested two ways, first halving the yeast (about ¾ tablespoon), and then dropping it way down to ½ teaspoon for a whole batch. Both work, but they work slowly. For the ½ teaspoon version, you need to give the dough 6 to 12 hours for its initial rise in the bucket (4 to 5 hours for the ¾ tablespoon version). But the dough will not need additional time after shaping; the 90-minute rest worked just as well for low-yeast dough as for high-yeast dough. Active time is still 5 minutes a loaf—it’s just the passive resting and rising times that escalate when you switch to the low-yeast version. See what you think and have fun by experimenting.
    If you do this with egg-enriched dough, to be on the safe side, do the rise in the refrigerator. A long countertop rise could be risky due to spoilage of the eggs.
     
    “MY LOAF-PAN BREAD STUCK TO THE PAN—WHAT DO I DO?”
    When making breads in a loaf pan using high-moisture dough, we recommend nonstick pans, but even then, we always coat with a thin layer of oil, butter, margarine, or shortening. Wet dough tends to behave like glue during the resting/rising period for loaf-pan breads. Occasionally, a loaf will stick to a pan, but there’s an easy way to get it out. After baking, simply wait about 10 minutes, and the loaf will steam free of the pan and you should be able to nudge it out easily. The crust that was in contact with the pan will be a bit moist and soft but it should dry out nicely, or you can put it back