Dropkick Your Bread Machine

My grandfather was fascinated by power tools. He also loved fresh bread. When some jackass invented the "bread machine," a tiny mixer, bread hook, and oven all in one space-consuming, single purpose, kitchen appliance, it was destined to find its way into my grandfather's house. It did, and I was subjected to bizarre-tasting, coffee-can-shaped loaves of bread for years. Bread should come in loaves, baguettes, batards, and rolls, but it should not look like an emigre from a child's block set. Further, those machines force the rise, resulting in bland, dull bread with a lot of alcohol steamed through it.

Dropkick the thing and get yourself a baking stone instead. My new favorite book is Peter Reinhardt's Artesian Bread Every Day. Reinhardt, a bread instructor at Johnson and Wales and the former proprietor of Brother Juniper's Bakery in San Francisco, is probably the foremost expert on bread baking in the U.S. right now.

Every Day is all about using the "cold ferment" process to make sumptuous, flavorful breads. The book isn't just recipes, but instead his heavy on theory and technique. The cold-ferment/slow -rise process ages the dough for a period of one night to four days, allowing you to make a batch that you can bake from daily while only having to do the more labor/dish-intensive tasks weekly or bi-weekly. The best part is that you get brilliant breads without using starter.

These slow-rise breads can be shaped and risen while you're doing prep for the rest of dinner, baked, then cooled while you finish cooking. Bread that's 45 minutes old beats the hell out of day-old baguettes from the Whole Foods.