Baking Bread 101

Tuesday, March 17, 2015


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

1 comment:

  1. 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...

    ReplyDelete

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