Home bread bakers, give me your wisdom

Cafe Society
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Many years ago I made bread for a living, so I know from bread. But doing it at a retail scale, even for a small bakery, is worlds different than doing it at home. Never got into it but I was forced by circumstance to do a little baking recently and now it’s itching at me.

So I scratched that itch last week and made a quick loaf. It was a little disappointing, but in the “oh I can definitely do better than this” sense.

I’m looking for general advice on how to successfully make bread in a home kitchen. What works best for getting a good crust? Do you steam your oven or just do the dutch oven method? Do you maintain an active starter, and how often do you use it? Do you cold proof? Do you knead by hand or is a stand mixer absolutely essential for you? Do you use a kitchen scale for precise ratios or do you measure by volume? Is there a particular book or author that has been especially helpful? That kind of stuff.

Thanks in advance!

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I am one million miles away from being an expert but I’ve had amazing, unbelievable success every time with the famous no knead bread recipe from Jim Lahey. It has an 18 hour proof (simply using packet yeast, proofed at room temperature) so you need to plan ahead, and then you just use the dutch oven method. Honestly it’s amazing. Crust is like the finest bakery-bought sourdough.

His book is worth the investment. Nigella Lawson put me onto it (I read her comment on Twitter, sadly not a personal friend).

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Alas, paywalled.

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Gift link

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Thanks!

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I am by no means an expert. But when I was sixteen, my mom gave me the Tassajara Bread Book* for Christmas, along with the gear. I was skeptical, having never baked anything before. It became a passion, and I bake a few dozen loaves a year.

That book teaches bread-baking less as a science and more as a symbiotic artform. You nurture the yeast, paying attention to the bread’s smells and textures and growth. Most measurement is very loose.

My favorite, standard bread is a steel-cut oat bread, made like this:

  1. Put 3-4 cups warm water in a big bowl along with ~1 T yeast and a big glop of honey (maybe 1/3-1/2 cup). Let it bubble.
  2. Add white bread flour until it’s the thickness of pancake batter. Whip it good with a wooden spoon a hundred or so times, until air is incorporated.
  3. Let the sponge rise about an hour until it’s real big.
  4. Meanwhile, pour a cup of boiling water over a cup of steel-cut oats and let them sit on the counter to soften.
  5. Add about a T of salt and the oats, and stir.
  6. Add enough whole wheat flour that the dough sticks together.
  7. Turn onto a heavily whole-wheat-floured surface and knead for about ten minutes, incorporating more flour.
  8. Set in an oiled bowl and cover for an hour to proof.
  9. Shape into loaves (either in loaf pans or on a baking sheet) and let proof for another half hour or so.
  10. Bake at 350 for about an hour, or until it’s lovely and golden and sounds hollow when you thump it on the bottom.
  11. Serve with butter, honey butter, sharp cheese, or the like.

*Link goes to a PDF. I think it’s legit, it’s the second link from Google, but I apologize if it’s not

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I’ve been baking bread at home for close to thirty years now. In my younger days, I enjoyed kneading by hand, but as I developed arthritis, that became too painful and not powerful enough. I’ve been using a Kitchenaid mixer for the last couple of decades, and it works very well.

Some of my experience may not translate, since I live at an elevation of about 5500 feet in a very dry climate. Although I did, along with approximately three quarters of the US population, bake sourdough bread in 2020, most of my loaves are yeast-raised and I let them rise on the counter in a kitchen that’s generally around 70F. The struggle for me is making sure my dough doesn’t dry out during rising and shaping but isn’t so wet that it results in heavy bread.

I used to kind of wing it when measuring ingredients - about 5 cups of flour to about 2 cups of liquid - but got tired of having unexpected failures or wrong-sized loaves. Nowadays I weigh everything (though I’m not as precise as that might imply).

Since no one else in the household regularly eats bread, a whole-wheat loaf can get stale or even moldy before I finish it. Because my goal is to have bread that’s suitable for sandwiches and that will fit in the toaster, I don’t usually make round or rustic loaves. I used to cut loaves baked in standard loaf pans and freeze half, but I didn’t like how the cut part would shrivel, so I ended up buying two of these mini Pullman pans. I don’t usually use the lids, but I have done so when I wanted a softer loaf.

My standard recipe is:

400 g whole wheat flour
20 g gluten flour (to help the rise)
265 g bread flour
15 g table salt
16 g granulated sugar
6 g yeast (I don’t actually weigh this; it’s 2.25 tsp)
30 g butter (ditto - it’s 2 Tbsp)
525 g warm water
75 g milk

Stir the flours together in large mixing bowl, reserving a little (1/4 - 1/3 c) white flour. Mix this with the salt in a small bowl and set aside. Heat water to almost boiling; pour a little (up to 1/4 c) over the sugar in a very small bowl to dissolve. Pour the remainder over butter; add milk and mix into large bowl of flour. When the sugar water reaches about 100 - 110⁰ F, stir in yeast and wait for it to proof. Mix the yeast and sugar water into the hydrated flour and knead until combined (at this point, I often let the dough rest a few minutes to give the yeast a good start). Knead in the salted flour well and continue kneading until the gluten is well-developed.

Form dough into a firm ball, coat with a flavor-neutral oil, and let rise, covered, until almost doubled (between 30 and 45 minutes, typically). Deflate the dough, form it into a ball and oil it again, let rise until almost doubled again. Deflate, divide into two balls, and allow it to rest 15 minutes. Grease two mini pans, form the dough into a firm round loaf, and allow to rise in pans until two fingers leave an impression (again, usually 30-45 min). Bake at 400⁰ for 40 minutes (I tip the loaves out after 30 minutes and let them finish baking on the pizza stone in order to get a crispy crust).

The pans I use are a bit esoteric, to say the least, so this recipe can also be used for one large loaf or a small one and some rolls.

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We keep the house in the mid-60s. What are the best ways to keep dough at ~70 using a gas range?

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Somebody-- my sister, I think – gave me the Tassajara book when I was in my early 20’s. I still use a modified Tassajara basic recipe: sponge stage, four risings, hand kneaded, takes about five hours. Over the years I left everything out by accident at least once except the flour and the water. Leaving the yeast out does not work. Everything else is optional; these days I use a little honey, no salt, and the only oil I use is to oil the rising bowl and the bread pans, though I do use a fair amount for that. Generally I use about two thirds whole wheat flour (the sponge stage is all whole wheat and some of the later addition is), a cup or so of either cornmeal or rye, and two or three cups of unbleached white wheat flour. I get really good flavor; I think the several hours of repeated rising makes for good flavor and the addition of a bit of non-wheat flour improves it also. So does using good wheat flour – I generally use King Arthur bread flours.

The recipe (which starts with 4 cups hot water and a tablespoon or so of yeast, add flour to the right texture for the stage of the bread) makes three loaves. I make bread a lot in the winter; and usually put two loaves in the freezer from each batch, filling up the freezers as the veggies and fruit put up in the summer come out. Then I have bread to eat in the warmer part of the year when I’m too busy with fieldwork to bake and some of the time it’s too hot to run the oven.

I’m going to start a batch in a little while.

You could heat a big pot of water on the gas range; then turn the heat off, put a plate over the pot, and put your rising bowl on that. Reheat if necessary, which it might be if you’re making a bread that takes several hours of rising. That’s what I usually do if I’m making bread when it’s not cold enough to run the wood stove (if the stove is going, I rise the bread on a small metal table that lives behind the wood stove.)

There’s also near a radiator if your house has radiators; or on (possibly raised just a bit over, depending on the mat) a seed starting heat mat if you’ve got one of those. A rack over a heating pad might work, I’ve never tried that. Direct on the pad would probably be too hot.

Cover the rising bowl with a towel or plate to keep the dough from drying out (this will also keep the cats out of it); and oil the outside of the dough in the non-sponge stages. If your bread goes through a sponge stage, if you don’t get back to it quite fast enough a plate is much easier to clean the sponge from than a towel.

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Thanks.

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My wife is the baker in the house, and a decent one, so these are second hand recommendations.

A loooong time as a sponge (overnight to 24 hours) is great for airy breads, insufficient household temps, and tired or old yeast.

Source some decent (no need to be super expensive) bread flour, too much dependence on AP is your enemy for crusty, chewy breads.

Your oven may be dependable with steam cooking for crusty bread, ours is not - but a cast iron dutchie brings home the bread every time.

Related to the above, your over may offer consistent, even heating. If not, get insurance with an oven thermometer, thermal mass, a dutchie or combination of the above.

An active culture in the house requires a commitment to loving care and cannibalistic hunger - great if you have both, not so great if either is lacking.

Mixing by hand is a great excuse to make less bread, which is good, but counterproductive to @Johnny_Bravo’s intent to make more, excellent bread. But getting a quality, generally expensive stand mixer just to make bread means you’ll need to bake a lot to justify the expense. Very much a YMMV. We have a stand mixer bought for several applications including bread, and my petite wife (5’3) enjoys it because it’s hard for her to bring much weight into the kneading equation on normal height counters.

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Here are three bread books that were written by professional bakers, but the audience in each case is the home baker.

The Village Baker, by Joe Ortiz

Bread, by Jeffrey Hamelman

Breaking Bread, by Martin Phillips

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I don’t knead on the counter. I knead on the kitchen table, which is the right height for me. The counters are much too high.

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That would be a very practical solution indeed!

Thankfully (?) we got the stand mixer for a number of other things long before my wife got into serious baking. She was turned off on from-scratch-baking shortly after we began dating when she tried to make a home-cooked dinner for two and made a small loaf and left it to rise on the (turned off) stove. At the time, she didn’t know that the upper left burner where she rested it was also the heat exhaust for the oven that was on for the rest of the meal that she was working on.

The bread 3/4 cooked on the burner before it was time to be baked, and came out like a dense brick.

I still ate it of course.

So additional baking wisdom - if your SO works hard on making fresh bread for you, and it’s at-all edible, you WILL eat it and thank them for the effort!

She’s gotten a lot better at cooking and baking in the last 29 years!

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My favorite bread book is James Beard’s book Beard on Bread.

Before my retirement my favorite thing was doing all sorts of breads and rolls. I used Beard’s challah recipe at work, but have found another one I like too.

The lady who does the channel has videos on all aspects of living kosher, and her bread is marvelous. Of course there are tons of challah videos but I like this one best so far.

Some folks have trouble getting a nice warm place to let the bread rise. I put it in an unheated oven and place alongside the dough a pan of steaming hot water.

When it comes to measuring I prefer to weigh the ingredients as “a cup” might vary by how lightly or heavily it’s packed. And using weights it’s easier to increase or decrease the volume of dough you want.

Crust texture varies depending on the type of bread. The sweeter it is the browner it gets. I love a crunchy crust.

If you ever do braided breads I can sent you a copy of a braiding manual I got at the baking institute. You don’t by any chance read Japanese do you? The manual came from some Japanese students, but the pictures above the captions are so very detailed that I’ve used it often without needing to know what is said.

Let me know how it’s going with your progress at home. I wish I could be there to work, as I said bread is my favorite. This weekend though I’m making cookies for hajario, in thanks for their answering a question about my Dope account I wasn’t smart enough to work out.

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I tried to send the link for the challah recipe but was told that a link couldn’t be imbedded in the post. It you go to YouTube and look for the channel titled frum it up you will find the videos a lady does about kosher living. The one about baking challah is usually near the top of the list. If you still can’t get it I will write it out. It, and the Beard challah recipe are the best.

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I must be a weirdo, since I prefer soft crust on bread. :slight_smile:

I don’t have a lot of counter space, so using my KitchenAid to knead is pretty necessary. My wrists won’t take the weight of cast iron cookware, so I don’t even own a Dutch oven.

Tips on keeping the crust nice and soft? :wink:

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A Pullman pan might be right for you!

I get softer crust when I don’t add steam to the oven. Putting an almost completely cool loaf into a sealed plastic bag will also cause the crust to soften overnight.

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Some other tips to achieve a softer crust:

  • Brush loaf with melted butter or other fat after it comes out of the oven.
  • Substitute milk for part of the liquid.
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Thanks to everybody for the advice and book suggestions.

I appreciate the offer but I don’t see myself making anything braided any time soon, though I did enjoy making challah at the bakery. It really honed my ability to quickly crack and separate eggs! I’ll definitely check out the YouTube channel.