My daily crusty bread

"The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in it's evocation of innocence and delight...."
M.F.K. Fischer, The Art of Eating

This is the type of recipe that you almost want to keep to yourself. You know the one where everyone loves it and it looks like it is a lot of work when, in reality, it is ridiculously easy.
The only reason I am even sharing it here is because no one in my family knows about this blog. Right now it is known as my bread and I'd like to keep it that way.

In fact it is so easy to make we have been eating it for supper almost every night since I first made it.The one pictured is an artisan style loaf that brings back memories of the type of bread we ate in Italy together with cheese, olives, wine and figs. But you can easily change it by adding whatever mix of whole grains and seeds you'd like...healthy food at its tastiest.

There is next to no work involved in making it... 5 minutes mixing it up the night before, a couple of minutes to punch it down the next day, then another minute to pop it in the pan. That's it,

The reason so little work produces such a beautiful bread is twofold.
....First is time....Between these small moments of work you give the bread, or more specifically the yeast, the time it needs to do it's own thing...eat and grow . It does quite nicely without our interference.
.....The second reason this works is how you bake it. Professional bakers have the luxury of having expensive ovens that deliver the right amount of moisture to the bread which results in a perfect crust. You can try adding moisture by spraying the bread, putting pans of water in the oven, all sorts of tricks. But trust me, they don't work as well as this simple method, you put it into a preheated heavy covered pot for half the cooking time.

Okay, enough jabbering..here is the link.
Use the covered pot method and choose a smaller loaf.
Trust me, you will get a perfect loaf even if you've never made bread before.