Jonathan's Bread 101 Notes

Why bake bread at home?

Bake versus Buy:	Commercial bread	Home-made bread
Crust	Soft, beige, uniform, flavorless	Crisp, crusty, crackled, bubbly, caramelized
Crumb	Soft, spongy, perfectly uniform	Open, varied, denser, chewy
Flour	Bleached, bromated, very white	Unbleached, off-white, whole grains added
Fats, sweeteners	Hydrogenated fats, sugar, corn syrup, malt syrup, etc	-None-
Other Ingredients	Dough conditioners, flavoring, yeast promoters, anti-staling, byproducts, preservatives	Yeast or starter, salt
Keeps fresh:	2 Weeks	1 day (fast rise, white) to 3 days (slow rise, multigrain)
Keeps frozen:	2 Months	2 Months
Satiety:	20 minutes later, you’re hungry	Practically a meal
Cost/loaf:	$1.50-3.50	28¢-40¢ per loaf
Prep time:		10 minutes/day (if you bake weekly)

Equipment:

Essential:

Large mixing bowl

Clean kitchen towels

Mixing fork, spoon or paddle

One or more of the following:

4 Bread loaf pans, pyrex or steel. ( I prefer pyrex)

Sheet pans (for rolls, round loaves, breadsticks) –perforated pans are the best

Baguette pan (for baguettes)

Some butter or oil to grease the pans

Nice to have, but not essential:

Kitchen scale (5 lbs or 2 Kg)

Stainless steel pocket thermometer

Ingredients:

Traditional bread is made from just flour, water, salt, and either yeast or starter.

•Flour:

Unbleached white flour (Heckers, King Arthur, etc) About $2.89/10 lbs at discount/warehouse store, which will make about TEN SANDWICH LOAVES !

Optional, but highly recommended additional flours, to add flavor, texture, nutrition:

Old-fashioned oats: big 2.3 lb drum, Quaker, or supermarket brand. Up to 10%

Corn meal: Hodgson Mills “whole corn meal” is best, otherwise any type of cornmeal is fine Up to 10%

Rye flour: Hodgson Mills “whole grain rye” is my favorite, but others are fine, too. No more than 5%

•Salt: use coarse kitchen salt (like Diamond “Kosher”, 3 lbs is about $1.50)

•Water: Any water that you’re willing to drink is fine!

•Leavens: Yeast or starter is used to ferment the dough and produce C0₂ gas bubbles, which “raise” the bread. Commercial yeast produces just the gas, while natural leavens also produce a lot of flavor, aroma and acidity.

Commercial Yeast:

Commercial yeast is typically a single strain of yeast, which has been bred for fast reproduction and high levels of C0₂production, so that bread will rise in an hour or two. “Red Star” or “Fleishmann’s”, sold in little packets in the refrigerated case, is just barely ok.

Better, and cheaper, is the bulk yeast available from health food stores, also made by Red Star but usually fresher that the packeted stuff. Bulk yeast can be stored in plastic deli container in the refrigerator, keeps for 1 year.

Starter:

Before commercial yeast was “invented” in the 19^th century, leaven was simply a piece of the previous day’s dough, which was used to inoculate today’s dough with the wild yeasts and lactic bacteria that will ferment it. These traditional leavens work slower than the commercial yeast, but they produce a much more interesting bread with better flavor, texture and crust. Known as Desem from the Dutch, or Leavain from the French, starters were handed from generation to generation, as part of the family legacy. My starter, which you will all take home with you today, has been “carried” by my good friend David Auerbach in North Carolina for about 25 years. It came from Russia before that, and who knows how old it is?

Natural starters usually contain several wild yeasts and wild lactic strains, which raise the dough slower, but generate more flavor, and also may increase the nutritional qualities of the bread. Depending on how you ferment your dough, the starter can be made to produce a more or less sour loaf, according to your tastes. Another interesting quality: naturally risen breads do not go stale as fast as yeast breads! A 100% white, yeast-risen baguette is stale after 12 hours, but a levain bread with some rye and oats will stay fresh for several days.

Care and feeding of your starter:

Starter should be kept in a glass jar in the refrigerator. If you have not used it in a few weeks, it is a good idea to revive it before use: double the starter’s weight by adding equal parts flour and water, mix well and leave on the counter overnight to ferment before using to raise dough. If you bake every week, you’ll not need to do this.

Process:

We will be learning how to make yeast-risen bread first, then we will also cover making levain, using David’s starter.

Batch size: A typical home oven can bake four 1-lb loaves all at once. It takes about the same amount of work to make four loaves as one, and the cooled bread can be sliced and frozen, so why make less then four? Bread makes an excellent gift, too.

The Nine Steps to Bread Bliss –BASIC RECIPE

MEASURE ~ MIX ~ KNEAD ~ RISE ~ SHAPE ~ SLASH ~RISE AGAIN ~ BAKE ~ COOL

The basic procedure for bread making is pretty much the same with yeast or starter, with differences in times and temperatures. The following basic yeast recipe is a good place to start.

MEASURE the flours, using the quantities given below and either measuring cups or a scale (a scale is much faster! A 5 lb/2 kg kitchen scale is a truly great investment, as is a $10 stainless steel pocket dial thermometer.)

Basic Yeast Recipe	Table-spoons	Cups	Weight, Lbs / Oz	Weight, grams
Unbleached Flour		9	2 / 4	1100
Oatmeal, old-fashioned		1.5	0 / 6	180
Cornmeal, whole		1	0 / 4	120
Rye, whole		.5	0 / 2	60
Salt (1.5%)	3		0 / 1.5	45
Water (~100F for yeast, room temp for starter)		8	4 / 0	1800
Bulk Yeast…	1
…or Starter		1

MIX all of the flours and salt together in a bowl. Make a well in the middle of the dry stuff, and add about a cup of the water at first. With a big fork, spoon, or paddle, stir some flour into the puddle until it just begins to thicken, then add more water, stir again, etc. until all of the water and all of the flour are mixed together. This will make a wet, sticky dough. Let this dough sit and “proof”, covered, at room temperature for about 30 minutes. Slowly knead in additional unbleached flour by the handful, just until the dough is firm enough to knead (this may take several cups of flour).

Flour your work surface and hands, and dump the dough out of the bowl. KNEAD the dough: fold the blob in half, squish it down, rotate 90 degrees and repeat. If the dough is still sticky, keep sprinkling it with flour as you knead. Keep kneading until the dough becomes taut and elastic, about 5 minutes. Flour the inside of the bowl, and put the lump of dough back in. Cover with a clean towel.

Let the dough RISE in the bowl for two hours at room temp. The dough should nearly double in bulk. Meanwhile, grease and flour the bread pans and preheat the oven to 425F. Remove one shelf and place the other in the middle position in the oven.

Dump the dough back out onto the floured work surface. The risen dough is full of bubbles, so we’ll knead the bubbles out and make the dough taut and elastic again. Divide the dough by eye into 4 more or less equal chunks—a scale is helpful here.

To SHAPE a loaf: knead the chunk of dough for a minute, then “roll” the dough around itself, creating a stretched-smooth top surface. Place the dough in the pan, smooth side up. (Note this is the hardest part of making bread to describe, but once you’ve done it in class, you’ll have the feel of it committed to memory.) Cover the pans with a damp towel and set aside while shaping the other loaves.

When all four loaves have been shaped, you’ll need to SLASH the tops, to prevent the loaves from splitting during the oven-rise, and to create a dramatic pattern, too. First, dust the top surface of each loaf with a goodly amount of unbleached flour. Then, using a very sharp knife (I use a straight razor), make three shallow, parallel, diagonal slashes across the top of the loaf. Then make another 2-3 slashes across the first set. The slash need only break the surface of the dough—as it rises, the width of the slash will spread. I suggest that you keep your slash work simple at first, but when you have had some practice, you can get quite creative.

Place the loaves in a warm place (top of the stove) and cover with damp cloths. Let the bread RISE AGAIN for about an hour, until the loaves are well risen to near the top of the pan.

After checking that the oven is at 425, place the four loaves, equally spaced on the oven shelf. Toss 6 ice cubes onto the floor of the oven: they will melt and make steam for about 2-3 minutes, which helps the bread to rise dramatically.

After 10 minutes in the oven, reduce the oven temp to 400.After 20 minutes in the oven, open the oven and quickly rearrange the loaves to even out the heat, and reduce temp to 375.

After 30 minutes in the oven, the loaves are nearly done. Quickly unload each loaf from its pan, place directly on the wire rack, and bake for another 10 minutes or so (making a total of about 40 minutes in the oven), until the crust is golden brown all over.

Test one loaf by thumping it on the bottom: if it sounds hollow, it’s done. Also, a pocket thermometer inserted into the loaf center should read about 180F.

Let the bread COOL for about an hour before slicing, so that the texture can set up. The bread will still be warm inside.

Because we added the oats and rye, this bread will stay fresh for at least 2 days, even though it was yeast-risen (levain-risen breads keep even longer!) We usually slice and freeze 2 loaves, and eat the other two right away.

Variations on the basic theme:

Starter-risen bread:

Instead of adding the yeast into the flour, dissolve your starter in cool water. After the first rise, remove a lump of dough and put it back in your starter jar for next time. The first rise will take about 8 hours at room temp. The second rise will take about 4 hours.

If all of this waiting discourages you, consider the following plan:

•Evening: mix, proof and knead the dough, let it rise overnight in a cool place.

•Before or after breakfast, steal back a cup of the dough, and put it in your starter jar and keep in the refrigerator for next time.

•Knead, shape and slash the loaves.

•Cover with plastic wrap and put in the fridge to rise slowly.

•When you get home from work, take loaves out of fridge, and pre-heat oven until it cycles off. Bake as in basic recipe.

Bread planning chart	Fast yeast	Slow yeast/fast levain	Slow levain
Measure, mix, knead	20 min	20 min	20 min
First rise	1 hour	4 hours	8 hours
Shape & Slash	20 min	20 min	20 min
Second rise	1 hour	1 hour (8 hours cold)	4 hours (12 hours cold)
Bake	20-40 min	20-40 min	20-40 min
Cool	1 hour	1 hour	1 hour
Start-to-Finish	4 hours	7 hours	14 hours

Please note that the slow methods take exactly as much of your time as the fast method—there is just more waiting. But, if you schedule the waiting times to coincide with your daily schedule, then the slow methods are probably less demanding than the quick method.

Slow-rising Yeast Bread:

Follow the basic yeast recipe, but use cold water in place of the warm, and cut the yeast in half. Do the rising in a cool place, which slows down the fermentation. The first rise can be overnight. The 2^nd rise will need about 4 hours.

Round loaves

Make a stiffer dough than for sandwich loaf pans. Form as if a loaf, place on a sheet pan covered with oatmeal, and tie a clean towel around the loaf to keep it from spreading. These can be made as large as you like (1-4 loaves worth of dough). Slash, rise and bake as in basic recipe. Note that bigger loaves take longer: up to an hour to bake. Check for doneness by thumping.

Baguettes

Using ½ loaf worth of dough, make a snake. Roll the snake into itself to create a taut top surface. Place in a well-floured baguette pan, with taut, smooth side up, slash, rise, bake as in basic recipe, about 20 minutes

Dinner rolls

Divide some dough into 3 oz (100 gram) lumps. Knead each for half a minute, then form a ball, and begin tucking the ball into its bottom, creating a stretched, smooth dome. Slash, rise, and bake for only 20 minutes.

Garlic bread

This is the real thing! Peel an entire head of fresh garlic and chop it fine in the food processor with 2 Tblsp of butter and 2 Tblsp olive oil. I like to add some paprika to this paste.

Make a dough snake, using one of the bread recipes above, and flatten it out. Spread it with a good layer of the garlic paste, then roll it back into a baguette shape. Slash a bit deeper than usual, to make a really nice pattern when the dough de-laminates. Bake for 20 minutes.

Pizza Dough

For baking pizzas, you need a hot surface. I have an old sheet pan covered with terra cotta floor tiles, which I place on the floor of the oven. The oven is cranked up to its highest setting and left there for an hour. Remove the bottom shelf, and put the top shelf in the highest track—you can re-heat finished pizzas there.

I make my pizza from this same basic recipe, but with just the unbleached flour. Divide the dough into 8 oz lumps for 12” diameter pizzas. Knead the lumps into tight balls, cover for an hour to slacken. Take a slack dough ball and flatten it out, using the heel of your palm and/or a pin. Stretch it out into a thin disc—this takes some practice. Place on a well-floured board or pizza-peel. Drizzle with a lot of olive oil, a VERY THIN coating of sauce, and then cover lightly with cheese. Bake on the terra-cotta until edge is brown, about 5-7 minutes.

Bagels

After first rise, knead dough well and divide into 3 oz balls. Take each ball, punch a hole with your thumb, and then stretch the hole bigger. Place on a well-floured pan and cover with a cloth. Let these “doughnuts” rise for a half-hour.

Bring a big pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Drop the bagels, 4 at a time into the water to boil for 3 minutes, flipping once in the middle. Place the water-risen bagels in well-floured pans, add chopped garlic, onion, seeds, etc. bake 20 minutes at 375F.

Slicing storing, thawing bread

Be sure to let the bread cool completely before slicing or bagging. You can freeze bread, sliced or unsliced, in a plastic bag or wrap, but keep unsliced bread at room temperature, cut side down, covered with a clean towel. Do not keep bread in the ‘fridge, which will make it go stale faster.

Sandwich loaves are usually easier to slice upside-down: the bottom crust is usually thinner than the top crust.

The only reason to slice your bread in advance is to be able to freeze it and then thaw it a few slices at a time.

Frozen slices will thaw in about 10 minutes at room temperature, whole loaves need an hour or so. To hasten thawing, you can place slices or whole loaves in a slow oven or toaster. Once thawed, bread should be eaten right away, as it will go stale quickly.

Freezing dough

You can freeze bread dough, but you’ll need to re-knead it after thawing, so it makes the most sense to freeze unshaped dough after the first rise. Thaw at room temperature, then knead the now-slackened dough, form loaves, etc. Personally, I prefer to make dough and bake it, freezing dough doesn’t seem worth the trouble.

If you like baking bread, you’ll LOVE baking in a wood-fired hearth oven:

"Bread Builders", by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott is an excellent book for those interested in building a hearth oven.

Enjoy!!!