6½ cups unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour
cornmeal or other flour for dusting
Preparation Instructions
In your large tub or whatever you plan to store the dough in, place all the ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until the dough is homogenous. You may need to get in there with your hands a bit to break things up. The dough should be just moist enough to ooze to the sides of the container when you let it sit for a second.
Cover and let sit at room temperature for about 2 hours. The dough is ready at this point but is easier to handle after it has been in the fridge.
After 2 hours move the tub to the fridge where it can stay for up to a week.
When you are ready to bake a loaf, simply grab your tub of dough and with well floured hands cut off a hunk about the size of a grapefruit.
Shape the loaf into a ball or oblong loaf, you will need to keep your hands well floured.
Place the shaped loaf on a non-rimmed pan or pizza peel with lots of flour or cornmeal to keep it from sticking. Put the tub of dough back in the fridge.
Allow the shaped loaf to sit at room temperature for about 40 minutes, it does not need to be covered.
About 20 minutes before baking, preheat your oven (with a baking stone in it) to 450˚. Also place a broiler pan on another rack below the stone.
When the oven is ready, liberally flour the top of the loaf and use a knife to slash the top of the loaf.
Open the oven and carefully slide the loaf onto the baking stone. The book says to just sort of jerk the loaf off the pizza peel, but I have not successfully done that yet (I keep trying though!) so I just use my dough scraper or a large spatula to sort of slide the dough off.
Once the dough is on the stone, pour a glass of water into the boiler pan and quickly shut the oven door to keep that steam in the oven.
Bake the loaf about 30 minutes or until the crust is a deep, golden brown.
Remove from the oven and let rest until cool.
Recipe by Foods of Our Lives at https://www.foodsofourlives.com/2014/01/crazy-easy-artisan-bread/