artisan bread in five minutes a day--first try

i tried making this bread! i made just a half batch (two loaves worth) to try it out. the first loaf turned out nice looking and with a great crust, but it didn't rise very much. i found out that while the book says to let it rise for 40 minutes, the "errata" section of the author's website says really it should be 40 minutes to an hour and a half, or longer if you have a cool kitchen. so i definitely did not rise it enough.

so the second loaf i let rise a lot longer, but after an hour and a half it still hadn't risen very much. it did rise more when i put it in the oven, but at 450 the crust hardens up pretty quick, so it didn't get much bigger than a sandwich bun (though it would be perfect for that) and didn't have much of a crumb to speak of. the loaves are really small, which actually is okay since that means it would be fresher more often. i didn't do the scoring on top deep enough, and i need to work on my sliding the dough off the "peel" (i don't have a peel so i used a cutting board with lots of cornmeal on it) onto the pizza stone. but i did that okay on the second one, and the steam method was really successful i think. so i'm going to try it again. maybe i'll make a double loaf for a bigger size. it looked pretty nice though!