Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I wish I could give you a green bread
to show some St. Patrick's Day spirit, but alas, the thought of grinding enough
spinach to make a green bread just sounds gross, and you all know me too well
to even think I would use artificial food coloring.
Instead, let us celebrate
homemade bread, which transcends all cultures.
Making your own bread at home really is easy, but it is also really easy to fail. The most common reason I have heard from others in bread failures
has been this: My bread was flat and hard as a rock. It’s tough to continue baking bread when you want a nice
fluffy loaf and are instead rewarded with something that could stand in for an
anchor. So, here are a few
easy tips and fixes:
Ingredient
quality. I’m sorry to say that
cheap yeast and cheap flour will not give you the loaf of bread you want. The great news is that flour and yeast
aren’t exactly wallet breakers.
Spend more on the ingredients you will use, and the texture and shape of
the bread will vastly improve. I’m
a King Arthur Flour girl. You
can’t sway me any other way, and countless wonderful loaves of bread have
proven King Arthur Flour is the best.
Proofing
the yeast. I use KAF instant
yeast. However, I never treat it
like instant yeast. Try as I
might, anytime I have skipped the proofing part, I have dense loaves of
bread. Even when using instant
yeast, which I use in all of my recipes, I proof the yeast.
How
to proof: Warm the water and milk amount called for in the recipe to tepid, not
a bit hotter. All microwaves vary,
but for instance, if I have a recipe that calls for 1 ½ cups of water, I will
warm that water for 30-40 seconds.
In your mixing bowl, combine the sugar (or honey) and yeast, and mix
with the now tepid water. Let
stand for 5 minutes until the yeast mixture has puffed. If it doesn’t puff, start over. Either the yeast is bad or the water
was too hot.
Using
too much whole wheat flour. Whole
wheat flour is dense, and using all whole wheat will yield a far denser loaf
than one made with white flour. If
you’re trying to add wheat flour to a recipe that only calls for white flour,
the best ratio to use is 3:!. For
every three cups of white flour, use one cup of whole wheat. KAF has a white whole wheat flour that is easily substituted without dense results.
Letting
the dough rise too long. After you
have mixed the ingredients and kneaded the dough, you need to let the dough
rise. For most breads, the initial
rise is 1.5-2 hours. If you forget
about it and let the dough rise too long, the finished loaf will taste very
yeasty. If you’re making a recipe
that you would like to let rise overnight in order to bake in the morning, use the
fridge to slow the rise and keep the yeasty taste away.
Letting
the finished loaf cool. Bread
piping hot from the oven sounds delicious, but there is no faster way to ruin
the loaf you just baked. Rule of
thumb: Bread needs at least an hour to cool (less for baguettes or rolls)
before you slice into it.
Breads
made with milk start crumbling faster than breads made with water. Luckily, breads are easy to
freeze. If you don’t think you’ll
use the whole loaf, wait until the bread has cooled, cut the loaf in half, and
freeze one half. Just remember to
take it out of the refrigerator a couple of hours before you want to eat it.
And with that, I’m off to clean
dishes. Our dishwasher is on
strike, and while I don’t mind hand-washing dishes here and there, it becomes
something entirely different when it is EVERY SINGLE DISH after EVERY SINGLE
MEAL. May the luck o' the Irish bless your own dishwasher, so you will not have to experience this very first world pain.
Time to fly,
Liz
What do you store your fresh bread in after its cooled, Liz? I put mine in a ziplock bag but wasn't sure if that was truly the best option...
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