Artisan Bread so easy it almost bakes itself

"One of the best books I have purchased in a long time is "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes" by Zoe Francois and Jeff Hertzberg you can find a lot of helpful information as well as how to video's at http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/. Jeff and Zoe have brought bread back to the masses. With a simple fool proof recipe. Since this was my first attempt at making bread, I have absolutely no experience with dough and this recipe couldn’t have been easier. You do need a few items to make this happen, first you need to make sure your oven temperature is correct, it needs to be at 450 degrees, so borrow or buy an oven thermometer to check its temp. Ovens can be off by as much as 75 degrees. Next you need to get a bread stone. You can invest in a really good heavy stone, most kitchen stores will have one, or I have even heard of people using unglazed tiles from Home Depot, they are an inexpensive alternative and when they crack you just throw them out...I figure for all I am saving on bread and pizza I can go for the stone. Next you need a pizza peel, to slide the dough off onto the stone, my choice is wood , but aluminum peels are available. If you want to try your hand at they can slice off a flat cookie sheet as well. (Although with a pizza this will be very difficult) So now that you have checked your oven temp and have your stone in your oven and peel ready to go, let’s make bread!! We only need four ingredients for bread, water, coarse salt, yeast and flour. Let’s talk about the flour first. According to the authors all of their recipes were made with all purpose flour, not bread flour. That being said, the next thing you need to know is all flours are not made equal. I use King Arthur’s flour at home for everything else, but it has a very high protein count (11.7), similar to bread flour (12.0). Now I can use it, but I will have to experiment to get the ratio's correct. So why bother and buy gold medal or Pillsbury flour which is closer to the 9.0 range. As for yeast just buy the packets of regular yeast or if you are going to make bread on a regular basis buy the jar, it will be cheaper. Salt needs to be kosher, or Sea Salt, the flavor of the salt really isn't going to come thru so any coarse salt will do. (If you use table salt, use will have to use less because it is more compact). Then we have water, and even if we all dream of using the legendary water of France or Italy, it really doesn't matter; in this case water is water. You will need a container to store your dough in to let it rise and to refrigerate it in. This dough can be made in either a Mixer with a dough attachment, or a food processor. Or you can mix it by hand the old fashioned way. I use a mixer with a dough attachment...."