How to: Bake Simply Stunning Artisanal Bread (on the first try)
Baking bread is one of those hard to qualify skills if you're looking at it from the outside with no real experience. On the one hand, people have been doing it for thousands of years in all sorts of climates with all sorts of varying available ingredients. On the other hand, it seems like a hard science that requires potentially its own baking contraption and yeast (who has baking yeast lying around?), meaning another trip to the grocery store. But here's the thing: it's not really that hard…
Forget the bread baker, Stillman Brown of PrimerMagazine.com makes this tasty bread in a dutch oven (you can check them out on Amazon for $36, otherwise ask a friend or find a garage sale). With no prior experience and just following the advice of his local bakery friend, Brown made this loaf of bread in these photos on his very first try.
Additionally, since the most time-intensive part of baking bread is actually giving the dough time to rise, this recipe is structured so that the instructions can be followed by the average joe working a 9-to-5 job. If you can bake some in time for Thanksgiving, more power to ya. If not, don't worry almost no one turns down freshly baked bread.
Justin
