Baking your own bread

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been having a bit of a hard time finding decent bread in my neighbourhood. No biggie, I think; I’m sort of a DIY guy, I make my own software, my own salad dressing, I shave my own beard, what could be so difficult about making my own bread?

I’ve made several attempts now and they’ve left me less than satisfied. The last loaf was palatable enough but far from spectacular. I tried different recipes, different types of flour, but I can’t make something close to what I’m craving for.

I’m trying to do some French-style bread, as this is what I grew up on and miss the most. I’m not necessarilly talking about baguette here, but more in line with larger breads like pain de campagne or pain d’épi. I want something with a real crust and an interior that has a certain elasticity and most off all actually tastes like bread.

I’m thinking the problem might be the fact that I’m using dry yeast. I’ve come to wonder if really good bread is hard to bake if you’re not, you know, a baker. I don’t have access to any other sort of leaven to test that out, though.

Are there any bakers or wannabe bakers that would want to share ideas, tips, recipes, etc. for home-made bread?

2

I get very good results using dry yeast, even when I use the rapid-mix method instead of proofing the yeast first. If you’re convinced your yeast is the problem, you can find cake yeast, but you may have to search for it.

What don’t you like about your bread so far? It’s hard to tell what the problem might be without knowing how you’re making it and what’s not coming out the way you want it. For instance, a lot of beginning bakers don’t knead their dough enough, and they often add too much flour during kneading. This leads to bread with a dry, coarse texture. If your crust isn’t crusty enough, you may be baking at too low a temperature or wrapping it up before it’s completely cooled. Let us know what your method is and what’s wrong with your loaves, and maybe someone will have more specific suggestions.

3

Thanks for the reply.

It’s sort of like that, like I said, it lacks elasticity. The last time, I tried a recipe with some whole-grain and rye flour, to see if it would help the taste but it didn’t help much. The breads always taste too much like raw flour and not enough like bread, although they smell right coming out of the oven.

I’ll mix in the flour, some butter, yeast and sugar with water. I knead for about 10 minutes. My oven has a nifty fermentation mode that allows to control the temperature and humidity. I set it at 40 C for one hour. Punch the gas out, mold it into shape. Let rise for another 25 minutes. Bake at 230 C for 10 minutes and finish (30 minutes?) at 200 C.

4

First of all, you want to make sure you have white bread flour, and to get a loaf with the chewy crust/tender interior, it’s necessary. Bread flour has a higher gluten content than other flours such as All Purpose, Pastry, or Cake Flour. Gluten is the protein that creates the elasticity you’re looking for in your dough.

Secondly, a good way to check if you’ve kneaded your dough long enough is to pull a little dough away, pinching the dough between your thumb and index fingers of both hands (not tearing away from your ball of dough), and if the bit of dough stretches to a thin sheath that can let in light, but doesn’t break or snap, then you’ve kneaded your dough enough.

Also, don’t just dump everything in the bowl at once. Dissolve your yeast in warm water with the sugar and salt, and let it sit for a bit until it’s foamy and active, then add in your fats and flour. You may also want to try the sponge method by after dissolving your yeast, stir in about a cup’s worth of flour and let it sit in a warm spot in your kitchen for a few hours. This gives the yeast a chance to develop, and will add a tremendous amount of flavor to your bread. Add the rest of the flour, knead and bake as usual.

5

Check. I tried different brands but always bought bread flour. Here, flour is ranked by gluten content, so buying the right type isn’t a problem.

Tremendous. I like that word. I’ve been “waking up” the yeast in lukewarm water, so I guess that’s a check also. However, that’s all I did. I’ll try your method next time. So far, my breads have had far from tremendous flavour.

6

I also find that it’s best to add the flour a little at a time, rather than all at once. After proofing the yeast, mix in the correct amount of liquid and fat you are using (which should be at room temperature), then add enough flour to make the dough kneadable but still a little sticky. Then dump it on the counter, knead it for a few seconds, and let it sit for about ten minutes. Then add flour a little at a time as you knead it. I usually stop adding flour and kneading when the dough just stops being sticky.

You might also not be letting it cook long enough, if the flour still tastes raw. Bread often looks cooked on the outside well before it’s really finished on the inside. The test for bread is to pick up the cooked loaf and tap it on the bottom with your fist. If the bread sounds hollow, it’s done. I find that I have to cook bread for nearly an hour to get it completely done.

If you want to include other flours than just white, put a measured amount of the other flours in first, then add the white flour as necessary to get the correct texture. However, the more whole grain or non-wheat flours you use, the denser the bread will be, just because there is less gluten to hold the air inside the bread.

7

You could also try to let the dough rise more slowly at lower temperatures - like overnight in the fridge, or just for some hours in cool place. I really think a slow will help develop a more chewy and elastic texture.
It’s important to check the dough to find out if it has risen as much as it should and no more than that, becouse that time will wary a bit. It isn’t always an hour. To check, poke at the dough, and if it’s still elastic, it hasn’t risen enough. If it collapses it’s too much. There’s a point in between where the dough isn’t etiher “fighting back” or collapses.

This page has a lot of very good and useful advise for the home baker.

8

Are you adding enough salt? IMHO, bread without enough salt can be pretty tasteless.

9

Salt is absolutely nescessary, if you want the yeast to work properly.

10

The Bread Bible suggests using an instant read thermometer to check doneness. Poke through one of the slashes in the crust and make sure the interior is between 200 and 211F. Thumping works, but only if you really know what is hollow sounding and what is only sort of hollow sounding.

Their other suggestion is to make a sponge with all the water, half the yeast and some of the flour, then mix the rest of the flour yeast and salt together and gently pile it on top. Let it rise the first time like this for a few hours (or overnight inthe fridge) until the sponge bubbles through the dry flour on top, then mix it all together and continue.

Salt is critical, if you’re going from a recipe, don’t skimp or estimate the salt, too little and it really does taste flat.

The Bread Bible is a very good book and goes into variations of bread making in quite a bit of detail.

11

If you want a nice crust, baking on a stone helps.

Professional ovens have a built in mistig system that also contributes to the formation of a crust.

You can duplicate this effect by misting the stone prior to baking, as well as misting the loaf (both prior to baking and about mid-way through your bake time).

This book not only has some great recipes, it also has some really useful tips and information.

12

You’re talking about baking real bread, right?

Not making a euphemism for counterfeiting?

13

Baking your own bread is one of the great pleasures in life. No bread machines, no automatic kneaders: just, the dough, and the oven.

Some general guidelines:

-Yeast loves sugar and moderate warmth, and will grow faster the more sugar it gets and the closer to ideal temperature the warmth. I think around 100 Fahrenheit is ideal, but somebody else can double-check; if the liquid feels pleasantly warm on your wrist, that’s just about perfect.
-Yeast is inhibited by salt and by certain enzymes in milk. If you scald the milk, you break down those enzymes, so make sure you scald milk before adding it to bread. And don’t add the salt until the yeast has gotten a chance to get started.
-Fats inhibit the development of gluten, so don’t add them until after the sponge.
-Fats, milk, and eggs all tenderize the bread. If you’ve got all three in the bread, it’s going to come out positively cakelike.
-Making French bread in your home oven is always going to be difficult; you should probably not use that as your gold standard at first, unless you’ve got a few thousand to spend on an uber-fancy oven.
-You can make a delicious loaf out of 100% whole wheat flour, but it’s gonna be heavy, the kind of bread you want in the middle of winter with some stinky rocquefort and dark beer and pickled onions.

Here’s my favorite bread recipe. Note that I learned to bake from The Tassajara Bread Book, a hippy/Buddhifornia book that’s positively wonderful but not big on precise measurements.

DILL BREAD
1 cup warm water
2 tablespoons active dry yeast
1/4 cup sugar

Dissolve all these together. Meanwhile, scald
2 cups milk

Let the milk cool to a yeast-friendly temperature, and add to the yeast. Add:
-Enough white flour to turn everything to a slurry the consistency of pancake batter, more or less.
Beat at leats 100 times with a wooden spoon, in a “flumphing” motion that incorporates as much air as possible into the dough.
Set to rise in a warm oven for 1 hour, or until doubled in bulk. Add:
-1 stick melted butter
-2 teaspoons salt (NOT TABLESPOONS! DANGER!)
-1 scrambled egg (raw, of course)
-a generous sprinkling or three of dill; continue to adjust dill during the following steps until the dough is nicely flecked with green

Stir this all in. Add:
-Enough flour so that the dough forms a coherent ball

Remove from your breadbowl, and set the breadbowl to soak in hot water. Place the dough on a heavily floured surface, and knead for at least 10 minutes, incorporating just enough additional flour to keep it from sticking to your hands. Taste often, unless you’re the kind of pansy who worries about salmonella. It should taste really good.

When the dough is looking springy and elastic, go wash out the breadbowl, dry it, and butter the insides. Put the dough in, and turn it upside down so that it’s buttered on top and on bottom. Cover lightly, and place back in the warm oven.

Let rise until doubled (about 1 hour), and punch down. Let rise another half-hour or so, and punch down again.

Remove from oven, and set oven to 350. Butter a cookie sheet. Pinch off a chunk of dough about the size of a jumbo egg, flatten it out, and pinch the edges together, so that the middle bulges out. Keep pinching the edges together until the other side looks roll-like; this takes some practice before you get good at it. Place this roll in the middle of the cookie sheet.

Keep making rolls, placing them in concentric circles around the one in the middle with the edges touching. Let rise for another 10 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, whisk together an egg with a dash of water, and brush this egg wash over the top of the rolls.

Bake for 20 minutes or so, or until the rolls are golden and beautiful on top (due to the magic of the egg-wash). Eat the first ones hot, slathered in butter; eat later ones with leftover turkey or salmon.

Daniel

14

Nothing stopping you from making your own leavening. In fact, if you’re looking for real flavor, the lack of any leavening other than dry yeast may be what’s stopping you. Most traditional French breads and most artisanal bakery breads today are made with some sort of starter. It could be just a sponge or poolish, where yeast, flour, and water are allowed to ferment for a while before being used, or it could be a levain or chef where dough from a previous day’s loaves has been saved and used as a starter, but you can bet that the breads you remember and long for weren’t made by just dumping some yeast and water together for a few minutes and then using it to leaven the dough.

Here’s a simple country bread recipe using a poolish. A purist would forego the milk in the poolish and just use water and a little sugar, but I’m too lazy to figure out what the appropriate amount of sugar would be in this case, so go with the milk.

The four hours for the sponge to ferment should be considered a minimum. A longer period will allow more lactic acid to form, giving the final result a more acidic “tang”. This isn’t a sourdough recipe, though, so you probably don’t want to go more than 8 hours or so.

Pay attention when the recipe says the dough should still be sticky. Any time before the final rise, if it’s not sticky it’s going to be too dry once it’s baked. Add as little flour as you can get away with during the shaping process – again, it’s easy to get too much flour and end up with a dry loaf.

If you want crust, you need steam during the baking process. I’ve done this in a lot of different ways, with varying degrees of success. I’ve gotten decent results from putting a small disposable aluminum baking pan on the floor of the oven and pouring hot water into it just as I put the loaves in – you want just enough to cover the bottom of the pan or else it’ll take too long for the water to boil off and generate the steam. I’ve also used spray bottle with a very fine mist setting to mist the entire interior of the oven on putting the loaves in and again partway through cooking. Do it too often, though, and the crust will get tough – and every time you open the oven door you reduce the internal temperature of the oven. Most people try to bake bread in ovens that are too cool to begin with – I had pretty good results from setting the oven to 500 degrees to heat the oven and the baking stone, then reducing the heat to 375 degrees or so after putting in the loaves. You really should have an oven thermometer so that you can tell how hot the oven actually is, as opposed to what it’s set for.

But really good bread is hard unless you are, you know, a baker. I did it nearly every day for nine months when I was out of work a couple of years ago, and I felt like I was only beginning to learn what I was doing by the end of that time.

15

Homemade bread is like sex: even if it’s nothing special, it’s still pretty damn good. Maybe you gotta be a pro to make super bread, but any schmoe with a little bit of experience can make something that beats the pants off anything you can buy at a grocery store.

Daniel

16

I don’t disagree that almost anything you bake yourself is going to be better than most packaged breads. But even with nine months of experimentation, I never got better bread than some of the breads from Whole Foods (actually, Harry’s Farmer’s Market here in Atlanta) or some of our other bakeries. Maybe it was just me. I still enjoyed both making and eating it, and I tend to be my own harshest critic about such things, so perhaps it was better than I remember, but I could always find ways it could be better.

17

Thanks all for the good tips. I think one of the problems I face is that I’m not comparing my bread to Wonder Bread-type grocery stuff. I’m comparing it to real French breads from real French bakeries. I know these places don’t use dry yeast and it’s why I was worried the leaven might be the problem. However, it does look like I’ve been doing a few things not so right.

Making bread is fun, at least until I get to the eating part, for now. I like kneading (no jokes please) my loaf and there’s a certain sense of accomplishement when you take out something out of the oven that looks and smells right. I can only imagine what it’ll be when I’ll get the taste right too.

The last recipe I tried skipped the salt, and I see that this might not have been a good thing. I’m probably using too much flour, or not enough water, and I’ll definitely try the sponge next time.

Ovens aren’t usually found in Japanese homes and flats. When you buy them, what you get looks more like a microwave oven and they come with all sorts of bells and whistles like infra-red sensors to control not only the temperature but how the heat is distributed. There’s an option to control the humidity and I might try playing with that to improve the crust.

18

I heartily recommend Ultimate Bread. I stole my copy from my mother. I used to bake bread whenever a paper wouldn’t come to me. Something about being able pummel the dough helped me think. :smiley: The potato bread is fantastic, but so is the Victorian milk bread. There are also quite a few French bread recipes in there, as well. The best part, though, are the extensive directions on the steps of bread baking – with tons of pictures.

I second the baking stone suggestion. Baking stones give great results for shaped loaves.

Make sure you buy an accurate thermometer for taking the temp of your water. If it’s too hot, you’ll kill the yeast. If it’s too cold, the yeast won’t wake up. My ideal temp is about 118 degrees Farenheit.

19

Well, they may use dry yeast (though it’s more likely they use a commercial moist cake yeast, or at least a commercial dry yeast, not the stuff in the little foil packets, and certainly not fast-rising yeasts), but not exclusively in any given batch – it’s almost always combined with some sort of starter. Ultimately, it’s all different strains of saccharomyces, but the starter has been allowed to ferment and develop a certain amount of flavor that can make all the difference.

Here’s another recipe, for a pain de campagne; note that the total time for this one is three days, of which two days is devoted to making and fermenting the starter and sponge. I think you might find it closer to what you’re looking for.

Might work, if it’ll actually increase the humidity and will in fact boost it to near 100% rapidly, and allow it to decrease fairly rapidly as well. You’re not trying to drown it, but to get extra moisture to the surface of the dough in the early stages so that the starches gelatinize and form a crisp outer layer – however, moisture also inhibits browning reactions, so too much moisture in the later stages of baking can result in a pale loaf with underdeveloped flavor. I generally spritz a couple of times in the first ten minutes of baking a large pain de campagne and not at all after that (remember that I generally also have water in a baking pan on the bottom of the oven at the beginning, but that I want it to have boiled away entirely by 1/3 to 1/2 of the total baking time).

Other general tips: you’re going to have to develop, from experience, a feel for what the dough should be like at various stages, and not worry overmuch about the actual measurements of the ingredients. The amount of flour and water won’t vary an enormous amount, but the ambient temperature and humidity, the age and type of the flour, how tired or well-rested you are, and a host of other factors will affect the proportion of flour to water that’s “right” on any given day. I found that I was far more likely to get too much flour than too much water in my doughs, but of course YMMV. Also, if you’re finding too much of a “floury” taste in your breads, you may simply be eating them too soon. A loaf right out of the oven will have a much more floury taste than one that’s been allowed to cool (or at least cool most of the way).