Five Minute Bread Baking

-38F WINDCHILL... BLIZZARD CONDITIONS AND DANGEROUS WIND CHILLS TODAY AND TONIGHT ACROSS CENTRAL AND WESTERN NORTH DAKOTA....BLIZZARD AND NEAR BLIZZARD CONDITIONS CAN BE EXPECTED THIS MORNING DUE TO STRONG NORTHWEST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS OF 40 TO 45 MPH.

I love a good blizzard. Snowed in, nowhere to go, a brand-new cookbook fortuitously arriving in the mail the day before - this is my ideal day.

I only hope it keeps blowing through Monday morning.

Granted, the dogs still need to be fed and maybe eventually I'll get out and attempt shoveling the sidewalk.

Better yet, we'll hold off on that shoveling idea.

So the new cookbook. My three friends who read this blog know that my true love is baking, especially bread baking, and that my future occupational ambitions teeter somewhere between opening a bakery and installing home wind turbines (we can talk wind turbines another day). Any Saturday morning, you can typically find me in the kitchen with the dough hook attachment running on my red KitchenAid mixer, flour dusting the counters and my black yoga pants.

But according to a slew of complimentary book reviews on Amazon, my Saturday morning routine is about to be turned on its head with Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I had to chuckle when I found out the authors are from Minneapolis. Of course, only a couple of practical, bread-crazed Midwesterners would come up with this!

The secret: make a big batch of high-moisture bread dough, keep it in the fridge (up to two weeks for the basic doughs), and cut off a grapefruit-sized chunk of dough to bake fresh whenever you want it. No kneading. No dough hooks. No kidding.

I made the 100% Whole Wheat recipe, which was printed in a Mother Earth News magazine article. It turned out great, but we ate through the bread too quickly, never testing the refrigerated dough theory to its fullest extent.

So my mission is to try out, to see if all the excitement around this book is justified. However, if the theory works and my bread baking routine is knocked down to only five minutes, I'll have to find another Saturday morning hobby.

I hear curling is making a comeback.

By the way, one of the authors, Zoe Francois, aka Minneapolis wedding cake extraordinaire, has an amazing baking blog that I will be adding to the favorites list. What can I say? It was love at first sight.