I’ve tried some different recipes with varied success. A friend gave me a very simple bread recipe (uses quick yeast), which seems to work quite well for me. It makes a lovely white bread, stiff enough to slice thin for sandwiches.
I have begun to make slight changes, adding cheese and garlic and such, all with great success.
However, I’m curious to know what you do to a bread recipe to make the bread lighter and fluffier. I am pleased with this bread but sometimes would like a light and airy loaf.
So I’m curious, what changes in the recipe to make the bread softer and lighter?
The recipe is basically;
tsp salt, tblsp sugar, 4 1/2 cups organic flour, packet quick yeast, 2 tblsp oil, almost 2 cusp of water. It rises twice and is baked at 400 degrees, makes two 8 inch loaves.
A softer (less protein) flour. Try a portion of cake flour instead of your organic all-purpose or bread flour. You can’t substitute all of it, or you won’t have enough gluten, though. I’d try switching out 1 cup and see what that gets you. It’s going to take some experimenting.
Garsh, I thought this would get more helpful replies.
It’s almost a science question, !
I use an all purpose flour for both cakes and breads so I can’t quite just switch them out.
I’ll certainly look for other flours but I’m not sure I know what I’m looking for.
And I’ve tried the kneading but I haven’t found that helpful so far. In fact I was warned not to over knead, :dubious: .
Well, I thank you for your suggestions not withstanding.
There are several types of wheat flour, and all of them should be available at your local mega mart.
All flour contains protein, which, when wet and kneaded, makes gluten. Gluten is responsible for those stretchy elastic strings you see when you knead. The more gluten, the chewier the loaf. Gluten is what allows your dough to stretch and catch the air bubbles from the yeast, and then bake solid, leaving holes in your loaf. Irregular holes - some big, some small - are the hallmark of a French baguette or Italian loaf. Not so good for sandwich making, because the big holes make things fall out. But a tender, chewy elastic bread.
Baking with less gluten means tiny, uniform holes, because the batter or dough doesn’t stretch very far to catch the air from the yeast. The air is more uniformly distributed, like in a Wonder bread. Good for sandwiches (or it would be if it had any flavor) not just because it’s softer, but because there’re no big holes for your mayo to drip through.
The more protein (and hence, the more gluten) a flour has, the “harder” it is. Bread flour is the hardest, at 12-14% protein. Cake flour has only 6-8% protein. So cake flour on its own gives you the nice fine uniform fluffy structure in a birthday cake. Bread flour alone will give you a nice firm elastic bread with holes of different size. Somewhere in the middle is a nice fluffy Wonder style loaf with better taste. (All-purpose has 10-12% protein, so it’s still a pretty hard flour. You can certainly use if for cakes, but your cake will be a little rougher in texture than when using cake flour.)
A tip of the fedora to WhyNot. You might try substituting High Gluten Flour for a cup or so of the flour you are using. You’ll find it among the other flours down at the Food Mastadon.
Well, over-kneading is a bad thing, but so is under-kneading. For years, my mom’s homemade bread was sort of heavy and dense. I started making it and kneading it for much longer (she has arthritis and can’t knead that long), and the result is a much lighter loaf.
Correct kneading (not too much, not too little) gets the gluten strands nice and thin and well dispersed, as well as breaking up the big bubbles into little teeny bubbles - so you get a more uniform and lighter loaf. Kneading too long breaks up too many bubbles and you end up back at hockey puck.
(I actually used that very phenomenon in a Chinese Medicine class once, as an example of “the mutual transformation of yin and yang.” A stiff dough (yin) will turn light and airy (yang) and then back to stiff (yin) - one always transforms into the other if it goes on long enough. Managed to illustrate all five relationships of yin and yang in bread making. Cool paper.)
I am kneading it quite long actually, and it comes out with small even holes - which I like when I want sandwiches, of course.
So it would seem I should try a cup or so of cake flour instead of the all purpose I’ve been using.
However, Asknot and Whynot seem to be offering conflicting advice, so now I’m still a bit confused. I get that I should substitute a cup of different flour. More gluten or less gluten?
Is cake flour labeled ‘cake flour’ or has it some other names?
What about self rising flour? I have some of that I use for a cakey bread that I make that doesn’t call for yeast. Should I try substituting that for all purpose flour? Or skip it as the recipe already calls for yeast?
I don’t bother with strong (bread) flour at all - I just use plain flour. It doesn’t keep fresh as long, but it never gets the chance to go stale anyway.
You can use self-raising flour to make soda bread, but with ordinary bread, the bubbles produced by the leavening agent will be mostly lost during kneading - that’s why soda bread recipes are minimally kneaded, and the resulting loaf is more ‘cakey’.
Are you kneading and proving once, then baking? You can get a more uniform texture (and often just a generally better loaf) by kneading, proving, ‘knocking back’ (kneading again), proving, then baking.
The other thing I find that makes for a lighter bread is to make thinner/flatter loaves - they bake lighter because they’re not straining under their own weight - focaccia is one of my favourites - form the dough into a disc like a thick pizza base - leave it to rise, then use your finger to poke deep holes all over it - spread a mixture of chopped garlic, rosemary and olive oil over the top and push most of the bits down into the holes. Sprinkle with coarse salt after baking.
Three other ideas:
-Try replacing part or all of the water with milk. I always scald the milk first (heat it until there are tiny bubbles around the edge of the saucepan); somewhere I read that this denatures a protein (or something like that) in the milk that inhibits yeast growth.
-Try adding an egg, plus a bit more flour.
-Try increasing the amount of fat in the bread.
The most cakelike bread that I make is made with milk and eggs and a lot of butter. It’s delicious, but not an everyday treat.
I was going to suggest what Left Hand said. For a softer loaf, add some milk and egg. Also, the higher the volume of liquid, the more the dough will axpand. If you want a dense loaf, add less liquid. For a light, airy loaf add a lot more. I suggest The Bread Bible, by Rose Levy Berenbaum, for a really great rundown on all sorts of bread.
!