I get the impression that most home cooks are scared of bread. I think the two primary contributing factors involved in this fear are (1) a daunting array of recipes and approaches…what works and where do you start, & (2) a less than stellar personal bread-baking experience based on a desire for instant bread gratification. I’d like to address both of these factors in the next few posts.
Most bread recipes do all the thinking for you. The approach I will take below is somewhat revolutionary: you should do the thinking for yourself! Instead of trying to live up to the promises that are made in a book or an online recipe, I argue that you’d do much better to take a little time to understand what goes into bread and how the ingredients affect the final product. With just a handful of ingredients and a basic understanding of how to combine them, you can be the arbiter of your own bread destiny.
Now, having said that, I want to follow up by stating that I do not believe there is such a thing as instant bread gratification. In order for a bread dough to do its thing, you have to give it some alone time and that means you have to plan ahead.
Goal – I want to make a single loaf of bread using only the most basic ingredients.
Here are the basic considerations/thoughts I keep in mind when I think about making a bare-bones white bread – I’ll go into greater detail for each step in the guidelines below.
1. Bread is basically flour, liquid, yeast, and salt.
2. Instead of using a recipe, decide how much bread you want to bake and then work backwards to determine how much of each ingredient (by weight) you want to use.
3. Give the yeast time to develop flavor.
4. Knead the dough using a stand mixer – not by hand.
5. Allow plenty of time for the bread to fully rise in each step before baking.
6. Determine when the bread is done by temperature – not by physical characteristics.
Guideline 1 – The most basic ingredients in bread are: flour (I’ll be using bread flour), liquid (I’ll be using tap water), yeast (active dry yeast or instant yeast), and salt. Once you understand the relative proportions of these ingredients in bread, it is simple enough to make adjustments and control the characteristics of the bread you want to bake.
Guideline 2 – The amount of flour you use (by weight) to make your bread is the foundation of everything else that follows. For this example, I’m planning to make a single loaf of bread. The loaf pan that I’ll be using is called a 1-Pound Loaf Pan (which is 8 1/2″ x 4 1/2″ x 2 3/4″). That means it is suitable for baking a loaf of bread made from 1-Pound of flour, so I’ll need 1-Pound (which is 16 ounces) of flour to make my loaf of bread. If I had used the larger 1.5-Pound Loaf Pan (which is 10″ x 5″ x 3″), I would have started out with 1.5-Pounds of flour. The amount of every other ingredient I use will be determined by how much flour I need for my bread.
Where we are so far: I need to use 16 oz. (by weight!!!) of flour – as I mentioned in the first guideline, I’ll be using bread flour.
Guideline 3 – The amount (by weight) of liquid in bread dough, expressed as a percentage of the total flour weight, is called the “hydration” of the dough. The hydration of bread dough determines the final texture of the baked bread – this is an incredibly important detail to consider when you’re trying to make bread to your liking. What separates bagels from sandwich bread from baguettes from ciabatta is basically the hydration of the dough – drier dough (less hydration) generates a denser texture in bread (bagel dough has a hydration of about 50%) – wetter dough (more hydration) generates an airier texture in bread (ciabatta dough has a hydration of about 85%). For a somewhat airy loaf of sandwich bread, I’m going to shoot for a middle-of-the-road hydration level of 65%. So…to determine how much water I will need, I know I’ll be using 1-Pound = 16 oz. of flour – so for a bread with a 65% hydration, I’ll use 65% of the flour weight in water: 16 oz. (flour) x 65% (hydration) = 10.4 oz of water needed.
Where we are so far: I need to use 16 oz. (by weight) of flour + 10.4 oz. (by weight) of liquid.
Guideline 4 – Determine how much yeast you will use and give the yeast time to develop flavor. You get better tasting bread by letting a little bit of yeast act slowly than by using a lot of yeast to act quickly. Most recipes that guide you to a loaf of bread as quickly as possible make a loaf of bread that tastes like YEAST!!!!! To get a loaf of bread that smells and tastes like heavenly bread, you need to use less yeast and give it time to work its magic. Start your process the night before you intend to bake your bread. This first step in our march to bread is called making a preferment (that’s a PRE-ferment). There are numerous approaches to this process of slow fermentation that have different names depending on how much of the flour and water you start off with. The approach I’ll cover here is called making a “Poolish.” Sometime the day or night before you will bake your loaf of bread, mix together half of the flour by weight (8 oz.) with an equal amount of cool water by weight (8 oz.). Add to this a smallish amount of yeast – I used 1 teaspoon (for even better tasting bread, you can use less yeast but it will take longer to rise the next day).
Guideline 5 – OK…why 1 tsp. of yeast? Here, as a starting point for measurement, plan on using .5% (that 1/2 %) of the total weight of the flour in yeast if you’re going to mix it up in a poolish and let ferment over time. We’re using 16 oz. of flour here, and so a little calculation gives us: 16 oz. (flour) x .5% = .08 oz. yeast which is a little less than a teaspoon. Using 1/2 tsp. would be OK – I decided to go with 1 tsp.
What we have so far: I mixed 8 oz. (by weight) of flour + 8 oz. (by weight) of water + 1 tsp. yeast and set it aside to ferment overnight. That leaves me with 8 oz. (by weight) of flour + 2.4 oz. (by weight) of water + some salt to mix into the dough later.
Mix these ingredients to combine (I used a fork) – the consistency here will be something like a pasty oatmeal.
Cover loosely and leave at room temperature to ferment for 10-24 hours (or so).
By the next morning, the mixture will look quite different.
Measure out the remaining bread flour (another 8 oz.) and the remaining water (2.4 oz. – remember we’re using 10.4 oz. overall and used 8 oz. of that to mix in the preferment). Add about 2 tsp. of salt.
Guideline 6 – Why 2 tsp. of salt? As a starting point for measurement, estimate the amount of salt for your bread by figuring it in as about 2% of the weight of the flour. We’re using 16 oz. of flour here, and so a little calculation gives us: 16 oz. (flour) x 2% = .32 oz. (or about 1/3 oz.) of salt. An ounce of salt is about 5 tsp. so 1/3 oz. of salt is about 1 2/3 tsp. and I just went a little bit heavy-handed in my recipe. Ultimately, 1 tsp. would work here, and 3 tsp. (= 1 tbsp.) would work here. You need to add enough salt to give the bread flavor and to allow it to do other important work, but for a home baker, there’s no reason to get too bogged down in micromanaging the measurement.
Guideline 7 – Use a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook to knead the dough. The dough will be very sticky and is not really suitable for kneading by hand.
So place everything in a stand mixer fitted with the dough-hook to knead.
Knead the dough on low speed for about 10-minutes. The dough should look shiny and moist.
Wipe oil on the interior of a large mixing bowl and transfer the dough from the stand mixer to the mixing bowl. To prevent sticking, the best way to transfer the dough is to use a spatula that has been wiped with oil. Place a piece of plastic wrap over the bowl with the dough. Here, I am diverging from nearly every treatise on bread baking – most instructions have you work the dough briefly with your hands to form a smooth ball that you place in the oiled bowl to rise. While this is easy to do with drier dough (less hydration), it’s a little tricky with wetter dough. Please feel free to agonize over this detail if you must, but rest assured that I don’t lose sleep over this step when I’m working with small amounts of wet dough – for this example, the dough went directly into the rising bowl from the stand mixer.
Let the dough rise until it has doubled in size. This might take a while – in my case it took about 2 hours. Don’t get impatient – give the dough all the time it needs to fully double in size.
Once the dough has doubled in size, remove the plastic wrap and coax the dough out onto a lightly floured counter. Sprinkle a little flour on top of the dough and coat your hands with flour. Using a bench scraper, lift the sides of the dough and fold them into the top center of the dough. This will gently deflate the dough and redistribute the yeast throughout the dough.
Using your hands, shape the dough into a log-shape the length of your loaf pan. Grease the loaf pan (I use shortening – just wiping the loaf pan with oil doesn’t always prevent sticking for me). Drop the dough into the loaf pan and cover with plastic wrap to rise again. Pre-heat the oven to 425° F.
The risen loaf should look something like this (mine took about 75 minutes to rise like this):
Using a sharp serrated knife, make a slash along the top of the loaf (this allows the bread to fully expand once it’s in the oven).
Finally – bake the bread at 425° F for about 15 minutes and then lower the temperature of the oven to 375° F.
Guideline 8 – Use an instant-read thermometer to determine when the bread is done – the internal temperature of the bread should be about 195° F (let’s say between 195°-200° F). In my case, it was done after 50 minutes (15 minutes at 425° F + 35 minutes at 375° F).
Allow the bread to cool on a cooling rack for about an hour.
Remove the loaf from the pan.
Here are three views of the finished bread from the inside:
The overall texture of a slice:
Internal structure (the texture or airiness that was determined by the hydration of the dough):
Crust structure:
For a summary of my approach, let me expand my initial list of considerations from the beginning of this blog entry.
1. Bread is basically flour, liquid, yeast, and salt.
2. Instead of using a recipe, I decided how much bread I wanted to bake and then worked backwards to determine how much of each ingredient (by weight) I would ultimately use. I determined that I would need to use 16 oz. of flour as a starting point for a single loaf of bread. To achieve a 65% hydration, I used 10.4 oz. of water. For amounts of yeast and salt, rather than prescribing exact amounts, I went with approximations based on what would work with my 16 oz. of flour. For 16 oz. of flour, I used about .5% of that weight in yeast and about 2% of that weight in salt. This approach is called using Bakers Percentages: planning out the amounts of ingredients you’ll need for baked goods using the weight of the flour as a baseline.
3. I gave the yeast time to develop flavor – I made a poolish by mixing the yeast with part of the flour and part of the water and gave it time to develop flavor and structure.
4. I added the remaining ingredients to my poolish and mixed the dough using a stand mixer – not by hand.
5. I allowed plenty of time for the bread to fully rise in each step before baking.
6. I started my bread at a higher temperature and then lowered it after 15 minutes to finish the baking and decided when the bread was done by temperature – not by physical characteristics.
Note – I didn’t mention gluten development even once in this blog entry even though it is always part of the considerations I make when approaching bread. The steps where I consider gluten development in the outline above are the preparation of the poolish and in the kneading of the dough in the stand mixer. I didn’t address it by name because it is a very complicated and broad topic. Here is a fairly technical summary of the science of gluten development (and certainly any search engine will be very generous with its recommendations of articles on gluten development).
Most of the steps in the approach I just outlined are identical to what you would find in any recipe for baking bread – you mix some things into a dough, you knead the dough, you allow the dough to rise, you deflate it and form it into your loaf, you allow it to rise again, then you bake it. My approach differs in two fundamental ways – I don’t prescribe specific measures of ingredients and I mix up part of the dough in advance to give the yeast time to develop flavor and structure in the dough.
For making a sandwich-y bread, here is how I keep the recipe in my head:
Weigh-out some flour. Use 65% of that flour weight in liquid (where the 65% is the hydration needed for the texture of bread I desire). Use .5% of that flour weight in yeast. Use 2% of that flour weight in salt. Then, to insure that the yeast has time to develop flavor and structure in the dough, start by mixing half the flour with an equal weight of liquid with the yeast (to form a preferment that is called a “poolish”) and allow it to do its thing for 10-24 hours or so. Knead everything using a stand mixer. Rise, shape, rise, bake.
Let me end on a negative note – although the texture or “airiness” of my bread was spot-on, any bread made with just flour, water, yeast, and salt is a little tough (and the crust is quite tough). While these may be desirable characteristics in an artisan bread or rustic loaf, they aren’t so desirable in a sandwich-y bread-and-butter loaf. I’ll address ways to soften the crumb and the crust of bread in the next two posts – first by examining pan pizza crust and then by delving into wheat and rye breads. The goal of this post was simply to examine the basic ingredients in a loaf of bread and to address the concept of measuring ingredients by weight in proportion to the amount of flour used in your bread.
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