The process is incredibly simple. Mix together some flour, water, salt and yeast and let it sit on the counter to rise for about 2 hours. In this regard it is similar to the no knead method (no kneading required). After that cover it, refrigerate it, and use it within 2 weeks. 2 weeks! How awesome is that?
Here's where the "5 minutes" part comes in: whenever you want some bread (say when you get home from work) take the dough from the fridge, cut off a grapefruit sized chunk, quickly form it and plop it on a pizza peel sprinkled with corn meal. It takes about 5 minutes (get it?). What do you do with the rest of the dough? Put it back in the fridge of course. You'll get about 4 loaves of bread from the master recipe.
Let the dough rest for 40 minutes on the pizza peel and preheat your oven to 450 with a stone on the top rack and a broiler pan underneath. After 40 minutes, slash the dough with a serrated knife, slide it onto the stone, and pour about a cup or so of water into the broiler pan. Careful, you're going to get lots of steam so don't burn yourself. 30 minutes in the oven and you get this...
I won't reprint the recipe here, but the master recipe that I've described above can be found in the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking or you can find it reprinted with permission on the web. I suggest looking at these websites, The Global Gourmet, or Mother Earth News. I don't see the need to ever make no knead bread again.
