I've been making bread using the 'Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day' method for a few years now, mostly in the winter when I have the time, and don't mind heating up the kitchen.
Over time I've fooled around with the basic recipe, trying different things like adding in the European flour blends from King Arthur--the flour brand I use exclusively. I've varied flour ratios, rising times, eaten my experiments. My current recipe is pretty simple, the flour ratio being: 5 cups bread flour, 1 cup whole wheat, and 1/2 cup buckwheat flour. The buckwheat flour adds a subtle, sourdough-like note to the bread.
But it 's not that recipe, but two recent experiments that proved interesting enough to move me to offer them up for anyone with a home bread lab.
Artisan bread hack #1: I have never been satisfied with the texture or flavor that came from using corn meal under the loaf. Plus I had to make sure that none of that crust got given to our dog Chloe because she's allergic to corn. Recent experiments with making Benne, or sesame cookies, had me substituting sesame seeds for corn meal. The resulting bread benefits from that toasty sesame seed flavor, and when you make toast that flavor only grows more pronounced. That's all I use now. Big bags from Bob's Red Mills.
Artisan bread hack #2: Free-form loaves are nice, but you end up lots of weird-shaped bread, and sometimes you want a more symmetrical loaf. But I didn't want to use a bread pan and give up that toasted sesame on a baking stone flavor. What to do?
Then inspiration struck. I had a 8" spring-form pan with a removable bottom. Would that work?
It does! I just spray the inside of the spring-form with a bit of cooking spray--which could probably be skipped since the pan is non-stick--and put it on my pizza peel, which has also been hit with cooking spray. Sprinkle the sesame seeds in the bottom, plop in your dough and let rise. The seeds and spray let the loaf slide off the peel onto the pre-heated stone at least as well as the corn ever did. More often than not the buckle on the pan doesn't even need to be released, after the bread has had a few minutes to cool it slips right off. I, at least, find the resulting loaf quite fetching.
Last note: the best container I've ever found for keeping the dough is one of those tall 4 liter plastic Sterilite water/juice pitchers, covering the top with plastic wrap rather than the flip lid. The risen dough comes right to the top when doubled, pulls away easily. It cleans fairly well, plays nice in the fridge. By the way, the best tool for scraping dried or gummy dough from that, or from the bowl of your stand mixer, is an old credit card or gift card.
And the pictured loaf was made using roughly half of a dough batch.