Canthook

It's Not Rocket Science

Although I gave a recipe with more ingredients in Bread 101, it can be even simpler to make bread. Alfred & Sam Italian Bakery, right down the street, lists flour, water, yeast, and malt as ingredients. Stan Evans Bakery in Grandview (Columbus, Ohio) used to list just wheat, water and yeast, if I recall correctly.

And one shouldn't turn up their nose at either of those bakeries. It's good bread. On the other hand, if you can make a lot of different products if you know what you can add.

Other Flours

The problem with making breads other than white bread is that only white bread flour has high levels of gluten. In fact, most flours have incredibly low levels of gluten. What most recipes do is use a 50/50 blend of the other flour with bread flour, and increase the amount of kneading in order to leverage the amount of gluten which is present.

These other flours don't have to be "flours", in fact. Potato bread uses mashed potato to replace flour and water. Cracked-wheat flour uses cracked wheat berries as an additive. There are 5-grain, 7-grain, and even 15-grain loaves being sold commercially - but in virtually all cases, the other grains play a subservient role, and at least half of the bread is from bread flour.

Sweeteners

I tend to use sugar when I'm baking bread. When I was young, brown sugar was sugar that had been refined less than white sugar, but these days, they make brown sugar by adding molasses to white sugar. In most recipes, brown sugar is used instead of white for the color or the flavor. In baking, it makes a difference and old recipes calling for brown sugar may have to modified to get exactly what you're looking for. Generally a tad more lard will do the job.

In the 1980s, cookie manufacturers started producing "soft" cookies, and it was a big marketing success. They managed to produce soft cookies by substituting corn syrup for sugar, or even high-fructose corn sugar. It does the same thing in bread, producing a "softer" product. It also degrades the flavor. Sugar produces a crisper, cleaner flavor.

A better way to produce a softer bread is to use honey. Honey also affects the flavor of the bread, but in this case, it is an improvement, or at least a change that is comparable in desirability, instead of the poor flavor produced by using corn syrup.

Lipids

Moisture in most foods comes from oil, rather than from water. That's why fat meats like hamburgers and briskets are so tasty, and lean hamburger is so tasteless. It works the same way in baked goods.

Using oil instead of lard produces a soft crust. Peanut oil or olive oil tends to soften the crust without making so tough and chewy like canola or soy oil does. Using bacon drippings instead of lard tends to produce an even crustier bread, and it adds a lot of flavor.

Some bakeries coat their bread before baking it with butter. It works better if you melt the butter first and clarify it (a product known as ghee). Butter is an emulsion, 80% fat and 20% water, but ghee eliminates the water phase.

Of course, you never want to use margarine or shortening, as an inevitable product of hydrogenating vegetable oils is trans fat. The only safe level of trans fat is none at all.

Sourdough Yeast and Rising Time

When bread rises, the sugars in the bread are converted into alcohol, which bakes off. The slower the rising process, the more flavorful the bread. If the bread rises too much, however, you end up with really big bubbles in the bread, and the bread is so dry that it almost seems stale when it comes fresh out of the oven. To limit the amount of rising, you can keep the dough at a cooler temperature, or reduce the sugar content of the bread.

Sourdough bread uses the natural yeasts in the air. The dry yeasts we buy are a side-product of the beer brewing process, and because the yeast is so concentrated, it tends to multiply faster. One of the reasons some sourdough bread is so tasty is that the bakery allows the dough to rise for three days before the dough is baked off.

To make a sourdough starter, mix a cup of flour, a tablespoon of sugar, and a cup of water, then leave the stuff open to the air. In a day or two, you will see that it has begun to bubble. As long as the mix is white, rather than colored, it should be OK. After that initial day, you should be able to cover the starter to avoid contamination, but cover it with a cloth, because it needs to breath. Keep it between 60F and 80F. When you make a batch, take half the starter, to make your sponge, and add a half-cup of flour, a half-cup of water, a teaspoon of sugar, stir, and cover. It takes about 24 hours for the starter to be ready.

If you don't make sourdough for a while, replenish every 3-4 days anyway. The longer you keep the batch of sourdough starter alive, the better flavors it will produce. I know people who have sourdough starter over a century old, passed down through the family.

Herbal Bread

To make an herbal bread, just toss in some herbs. If they are dried, you might want to have 2-3 tablespoons per recipe; if they are fresh herbs, you'll need considerably more. Dill weed bread is really good, especially if you use a nice olive oil instead of lard.

We buy dried vegetables in large cannisters for cooking. It's mostly dried celery, dried parsley, dried onion, and dried carrot. It makes an interesting bread. I toss it in the warm water ten minutes before I add yeast and sugar, so that it has time to hydrate fully. Blondie and I really enjoy this loaf, especially for sandwiches, or for garlic toast, but I suspect that not everyone would agree.

Eggs and Milk

Challah is a braided loaf in which egg has been added to the recipe. Eggs are a high-fat product, and they add protein, flavor and color to the bread. Traditionally, challah is "painted" with an egg wash as it finishes baking, so that it has a really shiny dark brown crust; sometimes, sesame seeds or poppy seeds are dropped onto the wet crust so that they are glued on.

It seems like milk should make bread better. It doesn't seem to affect the flavor or texture much, compared with just using water.

When I make egg bread, it's yellow anyhow, so I add some masa (corn) flour to the recipe. I haven't figured out how to add enough corn flour to give it a really corny flavor, without adding so much masa that the bread starts falling apart. Oh, well.

Raisins and Nuts

When you add big chunks like these, add them in the final kneading, or they tend to break apart. The Weston bakeries of Canada now own what used to be Catherine Clark Brownberry Ovens, and they produce "Health Nut" bread under their "Arnold" brand. It's a really interesting loaf that tends to resemble fruitcake as much as it does bread.

Other candied fruits can be added. Mom used to add red and green candied fruits to white bread every Easter. I was never able to figure out what the fruits were; they didn't taste of fruit so much as they did of sugar. The red and green hunks, though, looked festive and fun, and that seemed to be quite enough for us to enjoy the special loaves.

Other variations

Adding a lot of sugar to the recipe, you can make sweet rolls. Roll the dough into a flat square, about ten or twelve inches wide, and a quarter-inch thick. Paint the surface of the dough with milk, then sprinkle heavily with cinnamon and sugar. Roll up the dough, then cut it every half-inch. Place these spirals onto a cookie sheet, then sprinkle the top with sugar and cinnamon. Leave plenty of spacing between the rolls, because they will rise a lot in the oven. You can frost these with white frosting, or here in Pennsylvania, they fry these sweet rolls - "fried stickies" is a regional favorite.

Take a lump of dough, and roll it by hand until you have a rod about a half-inch in diameter, and perhaps 16 inches long. Take one end in each hand, and swing the loop until it twists upon itself, then lay it down, and bring each end down so that you form a pretzel shape. Toss the pretzel into a boiling solution of sodium hydroxide. Yes, lye. When it rises to the top, turn it over to boil the other side. Remove the pretzel (you'll want to use rubber gloves!) and toss it onto a cookie sheet, then salt it with really coarse salt, and bake it.

Pretzels are fairly soft when they are completely baked. If you prefer crunchy pretzels, they need to be dried. The lye bath is necessary to give pretzels the brown color and the "pretzely" taste. A big pretzel like this costs about $3 from most pretzel vendors, is far better than what you can find in the supermarket freezer case, and costs you only a few pennies.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
challah - cracked-wheat bread - fried stickies - fruited breads - gluten - herbal breads - lard - pretzels - raisin bread - seven-grain bread - shortening - sourdough - sweet breads