Canthook

Understanding Bread

If you have an understanding of bread, it doesn't take much to modify the recipe for a variety of purposes. This is a fairly long post, only because there are so many options for basic bread, Once you understand it, bread is actually easy to make, and it takes very little work on your part. You do not want to waste your money or counterspace on a "bread machine"; that makes as little sense as buying a special machine just to heat up canned soup.

Unfortunately, it's not the simplest thing to understand bread. It's not just a matter of following a recipe. I thought I was pretty good at baking bread thirty years ago, then I moved to a different city, and found that I needed to figure out how to make things work, all over again. Because I was shopping in a different supermarket, I had to buy different brands - and because the new place had forced air heat instead of hot water radiators, that made a difference, too.

Ingredients

6	cups	bread flour
1	tbsp	yeast
1	tsp	salt
2	cups	water
1/4	cup	lard
2/3	cup	sugar

Flour

You want bread flour, not regular flour. Bread flour has a high gluten content. If you buy bread flour at the supermarket, you'll pay a small fortune for it. Buy it at Costco or Sam's Club. Yes, it's a big bag, but you go through flour quickly when you're making bread regularly - and once you learn to make good bread, you'll want to make it regularly. And you can use bread flour instead of regular flour in most recipes without trouble.

If you don't have any containers big enough to hold the flour, you can put the excess flour in a plastic bag - the white 13-gallon size is nice - in a corrugated cardboard box or a plastic bucket. You will want to close the bag with a Kwik-Loc or a twist-tie, so it doesn't draw moisture from the air. Before I found containers to store the flour in, I double-bagged the flour, just to be sure. Gallon milk jugs, you would think, would be ideal for storing flour, but it's too hard to get it into and out of the gallons. I used to use the plastic buckets that I'd purchased for making sauerkraut in. The snap-on lids, however, seem to be a bad idea. I currently use some big plastic containers with screw lids, that pretzels came in; they hold about 1.5 or 2 gallons.

Yeast

While you're at the warehouse club, buy yeast there, too. Those little foil packets are really pricey. There are two types of yeast at the warehouse club, regular and rapid-rise. In theory, regular yeast is slower to work, and it gives a better flavor. In practice, there's not much difference in the flavor, and you get more dependable results with rapid rise. The yeast is a vacuum packed brick. When you open the yeast, it grows in volume.

You'll want two quart Mason jars, and one pint to hold the yeast. As soon as you open the yeast, immediately put it into the two quart jars, screw on the lids tightly, and stick it in the fridge, at the back. As long as it stays cold and dry, it's good for at least a year. You'll put the remainder into the pint mason jar, and it won't fill the jar. When you use up everything in the pint jar, open a quart, and pour about a half-pint of yeast into the pint jar, then reclose the quart jar quickly, and stick it back into the fridge.

Salt, water, fat, sugar

It's OK to use Kosher salt, but it's not as dense as table salt, so you will need to use a little more. Salt is not just important to flavor, but it limits the rising of the yeast. I prefer regular salt to iodized. I'm not sure, it could be my imagination, but I think iodized salt inhibits the yeast more.

If you have city water, it's a lot cheaper to use Brita to filter your tap water than to buy spring water, and I can't detect any difference. I can't detect any difference between using well water and using water that's been through a water softener, either.

If you use butter instead of lard, you need to use 25% more, and cut back on the water an equal amount, because butter is 20% water. Vegetable shortening is full of trans fats. It might be OK for a greasing axles on little red wagons, but it's not suitable for eating (nor for that matter, for putting on your skin.) Using a liquid oil, rather than lard, will give you a softer, denser loaf. Hard fats give you a crustier loaf. You will want to use soft room-temperature lard, as opposed to the cold lard you would use for pie crust.

It seems to take more honey to replace a given amount of sugar when baking than at room temperature. Maybe this is my imagination. Honey also tends to result in a softer, denser loaf.

Implements of Destruction

You'll want a huge stainless steel mixing bowl as well. A couple of drops of dish detergent, and hot water, and a stainless bowl cleans up easily and nicely. A pyrex bowl of equal size would be OK except that it's too heavy to handle easily. You don't want a wooden or plastic bowl because they soak up flavors, odors, and they don't exclude air.

You don't necessarily need loaf pans. Hearth breads - which is to say, breads baked on a sheet, rather than in a loaf pan - are at a disadvantage when making baloney sandwiches, but for almost everything else, I prefer hearth breads.

Getting started

Start the process by making a sponge. Get yourself a cup of water that's about 105F. That's the temperature you heat infant formula to, and you can test it the same way, by putting a few drops on the inside of your wrist. Add a heaping teaspoon of sugar to the water, and a tablespoon of yeast. (Yeast measurements are not critical. The yeast you buy simply gets the ball rolling, and you grow most of the yeast you actually use. Stir this up nicely, and set it aside. It should be frothy in five or ten minutes.

Pour the frothy yeast-water into a 2 quart mixing bowl, and add a cup of flour. Mix it up with a fork. Add another cup of flour, and mix it up some more. Cover the bowl, and leave it someplace warm to rise.

A rising place

I used to put rising dough in a mixing bowl, cover it with a calendar towel, and put it atop the china cabinet. Because we had hot water radiators, there was little air movement, and the warm air rose to the ceiling, so this was an ideal place to raise dough.

In most homes, you have to be a little more inventive. At various times, I've used an ice chest, and I've used a large corrugated cardboard carton with a 15-watt lightbulb adding warmth. A friend tells me that he used to get marvelous results by putting a 9x13x2 cake pan in the bottom of a cold oven, filled it with steamy water from a tea kettle, waited five minutes with the door shut, and then put the mixing bowl of dough into the oven.

In my current home, I put the bowl atop the refrigerator. We have forced-air heat, but there doesn't seem to be much air circulating there. We also have cereal boxes atop the refrigerator, so the boxes block air currents.

Finish the mixing

The sponge will double in 30 minutes to 2 hours. Hold out 2 cups of flour and mix the rest of the dry ingredients in your huge mixing bowl. Add the sponge, and mix. It will turn into something altogether too dry. When the lumps get small, start adding in the water, a little bit at a time. It will get terribly sticky. Start adding in the lard, a little at a time, adding all but about a tablespoon or two. Finally, you will add in flour, and this is the tricky part, because you don't want to add all that flour. What you're looking for is a soft, elastic, dough. You'll probably end up with about a cup of flour left over, to use for something else, some other day. How much dough you use will depend on how humid the day is, and how much moisture was in the flour you started out with.

You will use the last tablespoon or two of the lard to coat the outside of the dough, then cover it, and place the large mixing bowl in a warm place to rise.

After two or three hours

After a while, the dough will have doubled in size. You'll want to keep an eye on it, the first few times you make bread, because you don't want it to rise too much. After you've gotten used to the brands you're using, the warming place you have, etc., you'll know how long it will take. At this point, you will knead the bread and form it into two loaves. If you're making it in loaf pans, now is when you'll place it in the loaf pans. (If you use the narrow loaf pans, you may have three loaves instead of two. When I use loaf pans, I use the wide pans, and get two.) If you're making hearth breads, you'll put it on the cookie sheets. In either case, you'll probably end up with a seam; put it on the bottom. Cover the loaves, and put them back in the warming place to double again.

When the loaves have doubled in size, bake them. It should take about 30 minutes at about 350F, depending on the size and shape of your loaves, and depending on your oven. You can thump the loaves on the bottom to see whether they're done, or use a toothpick. Turn the loaves out of the pans onto wire racks and allow them to cool. When they reach room temperature and not before, you can cut them, or you can put them into zipper storage bags.

More tomorrow.
Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
bread flour - bread machines - hearth loaf - making bread - trans fats - yeast