Five minutes a day is a bald-faced lie but I suppose if you count only the minutes your hands are actually on the dough, it's probably around five minutes. The directions for making the dough is confusing at first (what's a gluten cloak?) but once you get the hang of it, it's all good. Most of the breads came out fantastic - a crunchy outer crust and a nice, firm but moist inside with a nice chewiness to it.

The authors recommend a bunch of baking equipment (from Williams-Sonoma, I believe) but if you don't want to spend $50 on a pizza stone, for example, you'll be fine. I don't have a pizza stone or a pizza peel so I simply use a cornmeal-dusted sheet of foil on a cookie sheet and all of my boule-formed loaves came out great. The bread recipes seem to be fairly forgiving if you do the ingredient ratios correctly.

There's a bunch of non-bread recipes in there too which look good but I haven't tried making any yet. Two breads I was more or less indifferent to was the Portuguese broa and the light wheat bread. The only recipe that came out bad was the pumpernickel, which tasted like wheat bread flavored with coffee. It sounds alright but the taste was just odd. Maybe it's because I left out the caramel coloring. Anyway, my favorites that I made a dozen times at least totally made up for the so-so breads. The brioche is a very dense and delicious eggy bread with a touch of sweetness from the honey. It also made the apartment smell AMAZING. The European peasant bread (which had regular all-purpose flour, wheat, and rye) is wonderful with anything. The Master Recipe boule is great too. I'll try making the bagels next.