Five-minute Bread

Ever heard of five-minute bread? The mere idea of making bread not to mention fabulous looking artisanal bread in five minutes a day is just tempting beyond belief. Of course, I just have to try it so I decided to play and experiment with flour, water, salt and yeast just to see if I can make something decent in five minutes.

For my experiment, I used 18 ounces of whole wheat bread flour (that's about 3 3/4 cups) 12 1/2 liquid ounces of lukewarm water, 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast. I foamed the yeast in 1/4 cup of the water and added a pinch of sugar then I put all of the ingredients in a large mixing bowl and just mixed everything together until it turned into some sort of a loose dough. I covered it with plastic wrap and left it in my kitchen counter for 20 hours. Yes, you got that right 20 hours. I used just a little bit of yeast so I figured the little buggers will need some time to do their job. As usual, Mr. Cat was a little bit freaked out about whatever kind of chemical reaction was happening in my dough so I snapped at him and told him he didn't have to eat it.

So the next day when I got out of bed the first thing I did was to check my dough and see what happened to it. I wasn't expecting much from it but it has more than doubled its size and it looked alive. Very exciting! I didn't punch it, somehow it just didn't feel right to take out my aggression into the poor innocent dough so I just gently pried it out of my mixing bowl and shaped it into a ball. I cut the ball in half and just shaped it into whatever form it wanted to take. One of them ended up looking like an amoeba. The other one looked like a ball. I cut some slits into the amoeba-shaped dough and baked it on a preheated pizza stone on the lower third of the oven at 450F. Just to make it a little bit more exciting, I put a baking pan filled with hot water underneath the pizza stone to give it some moisture.

Here's how it looked like.



The crust was nicely chewy. The crumb was surprisingly moist and light for a 100 % whole wheat bread.



The 20 hour rising/fermentation process allowed the flavour to fully mature and deepen. It has a mellow sour-dough like character to it which is heavenly with lightly salty butter and sweet Saskatoon berry jam. A generous dose of jam and butter always helps, of course.



For the ball-shaped dough, I baked it in a 450F oven in a covered and preheated cooking pot with no moisture for 20 minutes. It looked ghostly white and totally unappetizing so I removed the cover and baked it for another 30 minutes to give it some colour. Unfortunately, I probably over-cooked it because the crust ended up thick and crunchy.



The crumb wasn't bad though, don't you think?



It tasted just like the other one but the texture is so different. This is not so moist and more like white bread, it's fluffy and sadly, a little dry. Oh well, I guess I need to practice some more.