“The weight of 10 sacks of flour have just come off my shoulder. I feel a great sense of triumph to be able to easily make bread.” (myself)

“Peter, how did you make this bread? We buy our bread from the Italian bakery and this reminds us of the crusty bread they produce.” (Italian neighbor)

“Now this is bread!” ( my father)

“This is the best homemade bread I’ve ever had. My bread is good but I can never get my bread to get that crusty outside and fluffy inside”. ( my mother)
“Where did you buy this bread?” (my brother)

One of the most important aspects of sales, marketing or convincing someone of an idea or belief you hold is through testimonials.

I can now proudly proclaim to be able to make bread, without worry, without much effort and with some patience, make it esthetically appealing and delicious.

My friend Judy of No Fear Entertaining convinced me to order Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day in a matter of moments. I read her blog entry, trusted her proclamation and ordered the book through Amazon.

Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg are childhood friends who remain pals and colleagues after all these years (rare these days) and through trial & error, they’ve come up with a method to baking artisan bread with little effort and easy to follow instructions.

Let’s get one thing out of the way…you will not make bread in five minutes but what you will make is wonderful, artisan-style bread that does NOT require kneading, you mat place a large batch of dough in the fridge for up to 2 weeks or freeze dough portions for future baking.

The book centers around their “master recipe” and with this in hand, one can go off on many bread-making tangents such as baguettes, pizza dough, fougasse, pita bread and array of peasant loaves.

With this book, you’ll be armed with 100 bread making recipes, all backed by the master recipe for “no- knead” bread.

Zoe and Jeff also have a website and I urge you to have a peek about what they have to say and if you’re ready to buy the book, please note they there are some error’s & omissions in the book but they’ve been upfront about that I’ve already made notes in my book to reflect those changes.

Now that you’re ready to buy the book, I should also mention that you’ll need some basic equipment to guarantee an “artisan-style” bread each and every time:

• broiler pan
• pizza peel
• pizza stone
• plastic tub (or pail)

You need all of the above tools for re-creating artisan bread in your home. The broiler pan gets placed in the oven with hot water to create steam in the oven while baking.

A pizza peel is where you lay your dough to rest before baking and you’ll easily slide the dough into the oven just like your neighborhood baker.

The pizza stone goes into your oven to be pre-heated, re-creating the brick oven atmosphere of your local bakery and finally, the plastic tub (or pail) is where your wet dough is allowed to rise and be stored in your fridge for future baking.

There’s no real trick to makig artisan bread. The ingredients are tepid water, yeast, salt and flour…nothing else!

You’re probably wondering, where’s the recipe but I’m really hyped on this book, I think everyone should own a copy and everyone should tell their friends about buying this book…it’s that good!

I think Zoe and Jeff deserve all the success and rewards from the book sales, they went through alot of experimentation and time to offer up this book.

For those still on the fence about buying this book and in lieu of the artisan bread recipe, I’m giving away one book per 1oo (hundred) comments. Just leave a comment at the bottom of this post by no later than Friday February 7th, 2009 EST.

A draw will be held through a computer-generated random draw.

Good luck and happy baking!

P.S. Already have the book, no worries. You can still enter and if you win, give it to someone as a gift!

If you are not reading this post in a feed reader or at http://kalofagas.blogspot.com then the site you are reading is illegally publishing copyrighted material. Contact me at truenorth67 AT gmail DOT COM. All recipes, text and photographs in this post are the original creations & property of the author.
© 2007-2009 Peter Minakis