Authors & Books

Jeff Hertzberg is a physician with 20 years of experience in health care as a practitioner, consultant, & faculty member at the University of Minnesota Medical School.  His interests in baking & preventive health sparked a quest to apply the techniques of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2007) to healthier ingredients in Healthy Bread in Five Minute a Day (2009).  He lives in Minneapolis with his wife & two daughters.

Zoë François is passionate about food that is real, healthy, & always delicious.  She is a pastry chef trained at the Culinary Institute of America.  In addition to teaching baking & pastry courses nationally, she consults to the food industry & is the creator of the recipe blog www.zoebakes.com.  She lives in Minneapolis with her husband & two sons.

Mark Luinenburg has been a commercial photographer in the Twin Cities for more than 20 years. His work has been exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts & Walker Art Center & is in the Weisman Art Museum collection. His photographs have appeared in National Geographic Adventure, GQ, ESPN Magazine, Health Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, & Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

The Books

Jeff & Zoë wrote their first book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2007) so that baking homemade bread would be easy enough to become a daily ritual for everyone. That includes people struggling to balance work, family, friends, & social life (pretty much all of us). They refined their methods for refrigerator-stored artisan dough while juggling busy careers and families.  By 2009, “Artisan Bread” had a quarter-million copies in print!

Their second book, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2009), takes that same super-fast approach but applies it to healthier ingredients like whole grains, fruits, & vegetables.  A dozen of the recipes are 100% whole grain, & for the first time, they’ve included a chapter on gluten-free breads.

How we became a team (through a bit of sheer luck)…

In 2000, Jeff called in on the radio to describe a super-fast bread recipe (Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table on NPR):  artisan loaves with active preparation time of five minutes a day.  An editor from a major US publisher was listening to the radio show & asked for a book proposal.  Nothing happened until…

…Jeff & Zoë met while their toddlers were in a music class together. The kids played xylophones & they talked gluten cloaking.  They got busy with a book proposal and eventually, the manuscript for a book, which was released by St. Martin’s Press / Thomas Dunne Books on November 13, 2007.  Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day met the needs of an amateur like Jeff (it’s fast & easy), but it gives results professional enough to be served by Zoë, a pastry chef & baker trained at the Culinary Institute of America. Within a month of release, Artisan Bread became the number one bread cookbook on Amazon.com.  The success of Artisan Bread led to our creation of this website to support our readers & get their input.  Resoundingly, they asked us for another book focused on whole grains & other healthy ingredients.  That idea became Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. We also heard from readers who wanted gluten-free bread, so that’s in there too.  Enjoy!

The authors are busy at work creating their third book, tentatively titled “Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day,” scheduled for release by December 2011.