Tara: The bread went over wonderfully, and I’ll definitely be reviewing the book this week. We made a batch of cheese bread dough from it Sunday, and I baked some yesterday.

Since we don’t have a baking stone at the moment (I’ve used one before, though), I improvised a next-best-thing out of what we did have, and it worked stunningly well. We have these things we got a long time ago from the King Arthur Flour Company called the ’steam baking master’. Essentially though, the important part is, it’s a thin, dark, non-stick metal surface with tiny holes in the bottom. This allows the metal to heat up very quickly, and exposes the bottom of the bread to the heat. You can get curved French bread pans that are very similar and do the same thing. Either those or a baking stone should work almost equally well. This resulted in rolls that were very evenly crusty, even on the bottoms.