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Baking FAQSee these ingredient specific FAQs:
How do I make crusty bread? One word: steam. Lots of steam in the first five minutes of baking. But be aware that many home ovens are not designed to handle the kind of steam required to make really crusty bread, so try it at your own peril. What is the best way to store a loaf of bread? Crusty bread: paper. Soft breads: air tight plastic. It is that simple. Either type of bread can be wrapped in plastic and frozen, though I don't find crusty breads ever to completely recover.
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Slack doughs
I have a question: When I make a free-form bread, I am always afraid that when I have a slightly moister loaf, the dough will spread and not have the correct shape. By slack, what consistency would I look for? I made the baguettes from the "Artisan Baking" book for New Year's Eve, and even though I added more flour than it asked for (thus creating a slightly firmer dough) the holes were wonderful and the texture was amazing. I also made the English muffins from "The Bread Book" twice, one with a soft dough (what the recipe called for) which spread, and one a bit firmer, which didn't. Even though I have been baking bread for a while now, I am still wary about the soft doughs. What do you do?
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Slacker
At the moment I am a huge believer in "the wetter, the better." Wet doughs and folding have resulted in huge improvements in the quality of my breads.
(I am actually in the middle of writing a piece preaching the merits of slack doughs, so check back in a day or two. For the moment I'd direct you here for a good bit on it.)
I say some day when you are baking a batch of bread make another batch and leave it much wetter than you think you should. Use a lot of flour on your hands and your work surface and give it a shot. I bet you'll be pleasantly suprised with the results.
I've yet to make a standard French Bread dough that was so wet I couldn't bake it. The two or three batches of overly wet dough I've made have been either contained potato, which actually releases moisture as it ferments, or been sourdoughs, which I still don't have a handle on.
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Does all the hydration
Does all the hydration result in an overly sticky dough? How do you manage that? I've been trying to make Pan au levain using the autolyse technique and so far I've been ending up with incredibly sticky doughs.
Any comment?
Jim Haas, Kyiv Ukraine
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spreading
That sounds good, I'll try that next time. But what do you do to keep the dough from spreading too much?
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Preventing the spread
Folding, as they mention in the link above (and as I will mention in my next article) tightens the loaf up a great deal. 90% of the time two or three folds are enough to tighten a dough up sufficiently that it'll hold its shape.
If it isn't there are a few options: one is to let the dough rise in a brotform, as seen here. I fake a brotform by using a couple of small, round baskets I picked up at Goodwill for a buck each. Flour them well before placing the dough in them though or it'll stick.
Another trick is to use tea towels or something to hold the loaf in place while it is rising. I did that this weekend: I put a sheet of parchment on a baking sheet and sprinkled some semolina flour on top. I then rolled up three tea towels and placed one down each side and one down the middle. I sprinkled some flour on them and then placed my two log shaped loaves in the channels between them. I put the entire thing inside a plastic bag for the final rise and then removed the towels and slid the parchment onto my peel to transer them to the oven, baking them on top of the parchment on a baking stone. The towels forced the loaves to rise up instead of spreading out. The resulting loaf was very nice.
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Shaping
I find that what really helps for the bloom and shape too is to develop a good surface tension when shaping french bread dough. ;)
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Surface tension
Agreed. But one of the bests ways I've found to achieve good surface tension with really slack doughs is by folding. Each time I fold though surface tension gets a little bit greater. For final shaping I just need to repeat and preserve that.
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Folding wet doughs
I have been very impressed with the difference folding makes. It is a technique I read about here and found it can make a huge difference on the final bread. It is amazing how the slow and gentle method for developing the gluten helps the shaped loaf keep its shape. I tried a sourdough last weekend, and forgot that as the dough ferments it often seems to loosen up, thus causing flat loaves. However, with a slightly extend fermentation and an extra fold or two I had no problem with the loaves holding the shape.
If I feel the dough might be a little too "runny" I will also use the tea-towel trick
Jeff
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Can you please help me to
Can you please help me to create those wonderful holes in your bread? I tried your online technique but didn't work (5 times).
This is what I think is happening:
1. Mix your dough and let it rise.
2. When it 2x the size fold it like a letter on all sides.
3. When it 2x the size again fold it once again.
4. Let it rise to 2x the size and shape?
Any directions would be very helpful.....
mzublin
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spelt bread
with a bread machine,I have been making spelt bread. this is the fourth one and did not succeeded very well. have been using the receipe; one cup of water,should it be luke or cold water, and honey ,3 cup of spelt etc. the bread did not rise to one lb. it rises only half. when cutting the bread it falls apart. so don,t know what to do. spelt bread is the only flour that fits me. thank you very much with your answers and have a blessed day. andre.
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100% Spelt in Bread machine
I'm not too familiar with bread machines, Here is a discussion that might be of interest:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/1546/considering-bread-machine-please-advise
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It might jsut be that it is the spelt
I'm not massively experienced with this, but have tried spelt in a few different formats, including bread and pasta, and I have to say, it has always been a bit of a let down. Bread, as disappointing as yours by the sound of it, pasta spongy and lacking substance.
Don't forget that Spelt is the ancestral wheat so it is basically what you would have used before 1000's of years of intensive selection and breeding created the high gluten, better performing grains we get now. If you have to use spelt, you might just have to accept a lower quality of bread. No matter what the refinements in the production process you use, if the basic ingredient just isn't up to the job, then it will never be great.
That said, I may have just messed up my spelt experminents, and it could bequite possible to get a good loaf form it. It jsut didn't work that way for me and I assumed it was to do with the type of grain used.
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name of product or recipe for product
Hello...I'm looking for the name of a baked product my mom baked years ago...I remember it required rolling cold sweet yeast dough into a rectangle, spreading butter on it, folding it up, then repeating several times...this made the rolls or what-ever very flaky & rich...she eventually made a snail-looking thing and I think she put some kind of pineapple preserve in the center, or perhaps cream cheese, then baked after rising...seeing a pic of the Cream Cheese Snails, reminded me of this product...does anyone have a clue or recipe?
Thanks, Beth
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This sounds like puff
This sounds like puff pastry, which has another name which I can't remember right now. I think it's also how croissants are made.
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bakerb, puff pastry
KipperCat is right. There is all kinds of info if you search under "croissants" in here.
Also known to me in German as: Klassische Blätterteige, Falscher Blätterteig, Blitzblätterteig, Hefeblätterteig, Plunderblätterteig, or Quarkblättereteig depending upon the ingredients and amount of butter.
I have recipes where flour is combined with the butter (50g flour to 120g Butter or 100g flour to 250g Butter (for use with 500g bread dough) and shaped into a brick before being covered with yeast dough and rolled out, chilled and repeated.
The dough can be cut also into stripes and wraped around metal forms & funnels, and stacked to be baked and filled with creme de whatever good and rich, tasty, messy and fun. Chocolate drizzle and/or powdered sugar dusted, popular toppings both.
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name of product or recipe for product
Thanks for your help...I'll research these ideas! Beth
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Keep the fresh taste.
Hello my friends,We are going away this weekend, I am cooking and baking bread, and I am interested to know how long the bread keeps the fresh flavour and the top crust stays crunchy if it’s baked couple of days in advance.Since I am cooking and baking, I thought to start with the bread first, I always bake and eat the bread fresh, if I have extra I freeze them. I don't want to waste my work and end up with stale bread Appreciate a reply soon, Thanks for the great work every one!!! Arlette
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bread flour?
what exactly is bread flour?
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On way wheat flours are
On way wheat flours are divided is based on protein content. Higher protein means more gluten, more gluten means a stronger dough. In ascending order based on protein content, you'll typically find these kinds of flours in a supermarket:
1. Cake flour
2. Pastry flour (yes, this is different from cake flour, and no, it's not always that easy to find)
3. All purpose
4. Bread flour
So bread flour has the highest protein content, so that you can develop good structure in the final dough. Such a flour is often referred to as a "strong" or "hard" flour.
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recipe directions
I just found this site and love it. I am new to all and very interested in baking artesian breads so am trying to learn all I can. I notice your recipes are in grams instead of ounces, why?? How do I convert???
Thanks
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Converting grams to ounces
One ounce is 28.35 grams. So to go from ounces to grams, you would multiply the ounces figure by 28.35. To go from grams to ounces, divide grams by 28.35.
One cute trick is to go to google.com and enter (let's say you want to convert 6 ounces to grams) "6 ounces to grams" (omit the quotation marks), and Google does the conversion for you. Try it with other units.
Rosalie
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recipe directions
Thanks, I need to know how many ounces I need and it's quite a pain even goggling it, Thank you for your help though.
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water
I have a water softener, can I use my water??
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'wheat' and yeast free bread recipes - any assistance
I am after recipes or advice on creating recipes for bread that don't use wheat, bran, rice, chick peas, fava beans, almonds, pistachio, durum wheat/semolina, couscous, bulgar, barley, wheatgerm, soy bean/unfermented soy, mushroom/fungus or yeast. This I believe rules out sourdough as the starter, as it is an adaptation of yeast. Sugar has to be minimised but not honey and therefore, malt is an issue. Items that can be used include Egyptian flour [although I've had mixed feedback about this] , spelt, quinoa, amaranth, potato - sweet and usual, bean flour, oats, corn, xantham and guar gum, baking soda, yoghurt, buckwheat, chestnut, arrowroot, tapioca, flax seed, millet, pumpkin, singoda, mesquite, raagi/ragi flour, lentils, teff flour, taro, rye. I've tried a few variations and either have an rather unpleasant aftertaste [possibly the polenta addition] and don't rise well. Appreciate suggestions or any tried recipes. Thanks
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