I am a beginner of beginner bakers, very new to baking bread.
There was not a single time I succeeded with a bread recipe that requires anything longer than 5 minutes of kneading.
I was able to produce pretty good, eatable bread with Bread Bible's Pullman loaf sandwich bread recipe that was posted on this site, but that recipe required only about 5 minutes of kneading.
Here's the thing: I do use a scale, I measure everything correctly, follow the recipe as best as I could, but I still end up with really bad-smelling, rock-hard bread. Why???
I do know that I have NO IDEA WHAT IT MEANS "TO KNEAD UNTIL GLUTEN FORMS."
I've watched countless number of youtube videos about kneading, kneading techniques, hand kneading... but I still fail to bake a loaf of nice bread.
The funniest part about my bread making is that when I use no-knead recipes or recipes requiring very little kneading such as Peter Reinhart's stretch and fold technique, my bread comes out really nicely. Not the most perfect artisan bread, but really good and definitely tastey. WHY????
I really wanted to demystify why I am failing so miserably with hand kneading.
And no, I can afford neither KitchenAid nor a bread machine, and even if I could manage to buy one, there is no room for it/them.
Here's what I have done when the recipe calls to "knead until gluten develops:"
I follow the recipe to the tee, and the start kneading it for the specified amount of time (IF specified, which is usually 10-20 minutes). Some recipes tell me to knead, stretch the dough and pull it toward me, and smash the dough on the work surface, and I've followed all those methods of kneading as best as I could. I cut out a small piece and try to stretch it and see if it would stretch into a thin film and not rip. But whenever I try that, the small piece of dough would just rip as soon as I try to stretch it out into a small thin rectangle. So I almost always freak out and knead 5 more minutes, but it makes no difference. Then I let the dough sit in a bowl covered loosely with a clip wrap until the dough doubles or triples, but the dough never doubles or triples. (And yes, I used very fresh yeast...) And by the time I get the dough to the second rise in a loaf tin, the dough smells like sour alcohol like rice wine gone bad. I bake the bread, and it comes out tough and hard, with really bad sour alcohol smell to it that wouldn't go away.
And I do have a convection oven/microwave thing that burns and dries up cookies and brownies and bakes bread in less than half the time called for. Last time I somewhat successfully baked sandwich bread using the Bread Bible recipe, the recipe called for 425F for 1 hour baking, and I reduced the temp to 200C, and after 30 minutes, the crust was really dark brown bordering burned and it smelled a bit burned, although the inside was light, soft and fluffy. But that is besides the point of kneading I am sure.....
So let me summarize my "hand kneading problems" and bread making questions:
1. What does it really mean to "knead until gluten develops"? Why can't I, after kneading 10-20 minutes, get my dough to be whatever it should be so when I cut a small piece and try to stretch it, it stretches into a thin flim through which you can see your fingerprint (like some people have demonstrated on their youtube videos about hand kneading)?
2. Can I use a recipe that calls for KA kneading or bread machine and simply replace the machine kneading and rising work with hand kneading and old-fashioned at room temperature rising?
3. Can I just use stretch-and-fold technique or Dan Lepard's almost no-knead method or simply no-knead method instead of traditional kneading when trying to knead and bake a bread from any bread recipe? Or are those kneading (or no-knead) techniques only for recipes developed for those techinques? Would using stretch-and-fold technique in a bread recipe that calls for traditional kneading or KA kneading leave me with bread with huge holed crumbs like ciabatta bread?
4. Why does my dough (and the finished baked bread) almost always stink like sour alcohol? Did I do something wrong with the kneading? (I can only think of kneading as my problem because I always measure the ingredients with my scale, use fresh ingredients, etc.)
5. Some of the Korean recipes tell me to sift bread flour, put it in a large bowl, and then put on top of the flour instant dry yeast, sugar, and salt separately. So on top of the flour in a bowl, there would be three small mounds of dry yeast, sugar, and salt separately. And then milk + whisked egg would go in and the dry and the wet ingredients would be mixed. I did follow that, but I've noticed that bread recipes I got from online or from Western recipe books wouldn't do this. Would it matter to whisk all the dry ingredients and the pour in the wet ingredients and mix and knead like I was told to do with the Bread Bible's sandwich bread recipe?
6. Some homebakers that I saw from youtube videos told me that they never really measure their ingredients when baking a loaf of bread because they "know how the dough should look and feel." What does that mean? How should the dough look and feel? Does this mean that if they know how wet and smooth the dough should look and feel, then they could create their own recipe and add butter, sugar, milk and other ingredients and bake bread to their own liking? HOW??
I know I've asked a lot of questions, but trust me, that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how many questions I have about baking.... I just don't want to fail all the time when baking bread, and I want to know the world of zen-kneading as some bakers talk about. And I want to be a happy home baker who could create nice-tasting healthy bread without fancy, expensive, bulky machines... I live in a country where there are no pizza or bread stones available, KA is just being introduced, and having and using an oven is for almost professional bakers.
So please bear with me, share your wisdom, and help me out! I really want to bake breads at home.... with available resources.....
It would help if you provided some more information. What flour are you using? What is your fermentation and proofing times and temperatures? What kind of yeast are you using, how do you incorporate it into you dough, i.e. mix straight in, mix with water then add to flour, or what?
In a word, yes, you can substitute extended proofing with stretching and folding for hand-kneading. If you lengthen your fermentation times, you'll want to lower your yeast levels. Stretching and folding doesn't necessarily lead to large irregular holes in the crumb. In fact, it helps to distribute the gases with the dough and lead to a more uniform crumb.
Mixing. I think mixing the dry ingredients first will result in a more even distribution of ingredients, i.e. a more uniform mixture.
I recommend trying to bake the bread in a non-convection mode to start.
You seem to have a gluten development problem and leavening problem. The former could be a flour issue, knowing what kind of flour you are using could shine some light on this issue. The leavening problem could be a yeast problem (is your yeast really instant yeast or just active dry?) or a mixing problem. If it is active dry yeast, then it needs to be mixed with water first, then added to your flour. The no-knead long fermentation recipes typically with higher water contents work well with active dry yeast or instant yeast added directly, i.e. without proofing, and that seems to be your experience. If you are not mixing your dry ingredients well enough your could be ending up with local areas of high concentrations of ingredients. If so, and it is salt and yeast, the yeast will be suppressed by the abundance of salt. Again, the high water contents and long fermentation time of the no-knead recipes would tend to overcome this problem.
High fermentation and proofing temperatures could lead to an over fermented and overproofed alcoholic dough which has nothing left for oven spring when you bake it.
If you are weighing your ingredients and pre-mixing the dry ingredients, sifting should not be necessary.
Baking is about getting your ingredient ratios right. As a beginner, stick with your scale and weigh all your dry ingredients. Measuring spoons for the yeast are ok. Liquids can be measured by volume or weight.
Pick one recipe and stick with it. Make it many times, you will figure out what it needs and learn what the dough should look like at the various stages. All bakers start with a firm recipe, they may tweak the amounts as they go along, but that comes with a lot of experience. They definitely are not winging it.
I hope this helps, the others will no doubt correct me where needed and have more to add. Stick with it, we have all had our growing pains; you'll get it right eventually.
Living in South Korea, getting the kinds of flours people use/mention on TFL is almost near impossible (unless I'm really rich and I can get expensive stuff from very selected stores far far way from where I live).
I used a very widely used Korean brand of unbleached bread flour, which claims to have 23% carbohydrates, 20% protein, 2% fat, and 3% sodium.
I used Saf Instant Yeast Red because I only had two choices: Saf and a no-name Korean brand "dry yeast" that does not specify whether it is instant or active dry yeast. I opt for something that looked more familiar with some English description on it - hence Saf Instant Yeast.
I used a Korean recipe for "milk bread" because I thought since the recipe called for ingredients I would be able to find without spending too much money or going to a fancy big stores far away from my house.
After reading your informative reply, I went back to the recipe, and here's what the recipe told me to do, which I followed quite religiously and FAILED to bake a good loaf of bread:
The recipe says to "knead until gluten develops and passes the windowpane test." No time specified. After kneading, the recipe says to put the dough in a bowl, cover with a piece of cling wrap, and "put the bowl in a warm place (around 40C) until the dough rises to 2.5 times its original size (around 60 minutes)." Then the recipe calls for the dough to "fold the dough to degas," and the divide the dough into 16 pieces with equal weight. Then those 16 dough balls are shaped into round smooth balls, 10-15 minutes rest, and then degasing and forming into smooth balls again, put into a square tin, then allowed to rise for 40-50 minutes (35C). Then the top of the dough is brushed with milk, baked at 180C for 20-25 minutes.
What did I possibly do wrong? I mean after kneading, the dough wouldn't even double even when I put the dough in a bowl and stuck it in a preheated-to-40C-and-turned-off oven for 1 hour as the recipe called for. By the time I had to do the second rise, it just wouldn't rise all that much, and the dough started stinking like sour alcohol.
I tried baking bread with this recipe with a non-convection mini oven, failed (tough and smelling like alcohol). I tried baking this bread with my convection oven on grill mode (there are only three options: full convection mode, top/bottom grill and convection mode, top and bottom grill mode), burned the whole thing even with adjusting the temperature (charcoal block every time I use this mode, not just for breadbaking but for cookies, brownies, cakes, etc.). I tried baking this bread with my convection oven on convection mode, and the consistency was probably the best out of all the attempts I've made but still the final product smelled like alcohol and tough to chew.
I have no other choice but to measure all the ingredients since all the ingredients in a Korean baking recipe is given in grams.
What did I do wrong...? I might give this recipe a go again one more time by whisking all the dry ingredients, measuring everything, getting the temperature right, and maybe stretch and fold technique rather than kneading and windowpane test.... Would that work?
Thank you for your reply... You taught me a lot!
no wonder! That must be a typo, 12% is more likely. please check again. 23% carbohydrates is also unusual
Mini,
I kid you not, that was NOT a typo.... I checked the label many times, checked the brand website, called the company... and it was not a typo....
In South Korea, the "normal" cake flour has 13% protein & 24% carb, the "normal" all-purpose flour has 18% protein & 24% carb, and the "normal" bread flour has 20% protein & 23% carb. I do not know why.... The label of all those flours said they produced their unbleached flours (cake, AP, and bread flours) from American wheat or a blend of American wheat and Canadian wheat. Obviously, I freaked out the first time I checked out the protein content of those flours, tried different brands (only available in Korea....), and all of them have really high protein content. I don't know why.... Perhaps that is why all Korean cookie books call for "cake flour" and never "all-purpose" flour.
The scariest thing of all is in Korea, they have 100% unbleached wholewheat "Korean" wheat flour, and it has the "all-purpose flour" label and it has 22% protein & 22% carb! I've tried baking chocolate chip cookies and it tastes very flavourful. Made some pizza dough using the master pizza dough recipe from Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois's Artisan Pizza and Flatbread in Five Minutes a Day, and the dough was super flavourful, with strong whole wheat-ish flavour. Really different, complex, but super enjoyable taste and texture. Never attempted baking bread with it, because the protein ratio of that flour numbed me with fear.
Oh, and in South Korea, brown sugar (both light brown and dark brown) have no molasses in it. Just caramel and syrup to add colour. I had to go to a foreign food store 2 hours drive away from my house to get a bottle of unsulfured molasses from the States to make my own brown sugar. Perhaps I should go there and ask if they have some non Korean brand flour.... Or try Korean "normal" AP flour or cake flour maybe?
I really miss living in Canada... (where I am originally from....)
When comparing, the cake flour has less protein than the AP and so on... so far so good, it's just including perhaps more info somehow. Is the gram amount listed on the package... out of 100g how much is protein, carb., fat, etc.?
I purchased the "brown sugar" don't remember having troubles with it. Because it is dry, I would sometimes add a half to one spoon of water or milk to the recipe. Brown sugar in America is rather moist and depending on how it is packed into a cup can weigh more or less than a cup of white crystal sugar. One of my favorite tasting natural brown sugars comes from palm sugar, and naturally the recipes involved need to be tweaked depending on the moisture in the sugar. Never saw it in Korea.
I would buy "three spoons flour" (?) the one with the bread pictured on the front and blend it sometimes with the one with cookies on the front (so the illiterate ways...) and I did have a little very expensive rye from Seoul. Don't be afraid to add a little bit more water if you need to.
You also have ingredients there that are not familiar to the rest of the world like acorn flour and vegitable flours and oils like rice oil and grape seed oil all of which have a special charm. I had no luck with barley flours and ran into trouble with "rope" there so I advise caution. You also have a large variety of soy beans that could be used in bread recipes. Brown rice and other non-gluten possibilities. Red bean paste and yellow bean paste and what about the many different salts and seaweed that can get into bread. I sure do long for those fine squashes sold in the supermarkets. Some of that cooked squash works out well with the pumpkin and sweet potato bread recipes Floyd posted here on TFL.
Mini, it may confuse others, but I knew exactly which flour you were talking about because that's the one I use.
You were right, the percentage was for something else. I had trouble with the Korean terms they were using. Per 100g of bread flour, it contains 74g of carbs, 12 g of protein, and 50 mg of sodium. Now that sounds about right I think, and so it must've been my inexperienced kneading and other factors that led to my failure.
As for sugar, nowadays they have some cane sugars, but they're even drier than the Korean brand brown sugars. I am not familiar with cane sugar so I am not sure if it is supposed to be that dry.
And for cookies, I did add some water or milk to moisten the brown sugar but the texture was never chewy like I used to get back in Canada. Also, there was something missing in the taste. Those problems were all solved when I started buying molasses and making fresh brown sugar at home. :D
I will definitely look into other kinds of flours and try even their brown rice and other non wheat flours once I get the hang of how a ball of bread dough should look and feel. I do use grape seed oil for baking and it has given me some wonderful muffins and quickbreads :D Maybe I'll use it for bread too!
Thank you soooooo much for your help! You're an angel from heaven!
About a year ago, I was where you are now. It gets a lot better, but it's going to take practice.
The idea of kneading is to sort of stretch and fold back the dough multiple times in different directions, so that the gluten in it gets worked and strengthened. This enables the dough to hold in the gasses produced by the yeast and expand. If the gluten isn't developed enough, the dough is like a leaky balloon - the gasses escape and the dough is more prone to collapse.
Once I understood this concept, I realised that the actual method of kneading didn't matter so much as long as I was stretching and working it consistently in all directions. When kneading, don't go by clock time. When I first began, I could take as long as 45 min to produce a well-kneaded sandwich bread dough, because my movements were so unsure. Now it takes me less than half the time.
So, how to test gluten development if you don't know what bread dough should even look or feel like?
Use the window-pane test - stretching out a small piece of dough to see if it can extend to a smooth translucent film. I know you're already trying this, but here's a few tips based on my own newbie mistakes:
1. Let the dough rest a few minutes (I usually wait 3-5 min) before testing. If the dough is still tight from just being kneaded, it won't extend well.
2. Slightly wet or oil your fingers to prevent sticking. Sticky fingers will cause tearing.
3. Gently tease and stretch with your fingers; don't pull vigorously.
Yes. Kneading is kneading, whether by machine or hand. It may just take slightly longer by hand. Likewise, bread will rise, whether in a bread machine or at room temperature. It may just rise more slowly if it's cool, or faster if it's warm.
Why does no-knead bread, or bread using just stretch-and-fold also work?
Left to itself, wetted flour (like in a bread dough) will also develop gluten strength over time. Stretch-and-folds help to develop the gluten (it may help to think of the gluten forming a "matrix", like a net that traps air) but in a less organised way, so you get bigger and more uneven holes in the bread. S&F will work for any dough, even dryer ones, but the final bread texture may be different (to varying degrees) from usual kneading.
They can do this because they've made that formula (or similar ones) so many times that their wealth of experience fills in the blanks. Bastards. ;-)
If you know anyone at all who bakes bread, try asking them if you can watch them one time. There is no substitute for having someone show you: this, this is what dough is supposed to look/feel/smell like. I was desperate for that when I first started, but no one I knew baked.
You probably have issues other than gluten development, but those are a bit over my head. Hopefully more knowledgeable and experienced posters will chime in, and also correct me if I'm wrong about anything.
Well, I didn't know about gas leaking and all that! Thank you for enlightening me!
I did the windowpane test but the dough would still rip. I ended up kneading the dough for an hour, and the dough would still not pass the windowpane test, and the final product was tough, sour alcohol smelling fail....
I was really hoping maybe I could use the S&F method and get nice fluffy light bread, but I guess that's not going to happen. Must learn the traditional zen-kneading!
The thing is.... I live in South Korea where eating bread is not a regular meal thing, and baking is absolutely not a regular thing at all.... Few people bake, and those who bake opt for a bread machine and a KA. And those who claim to hand knead use dough enhancer. I thought of homebaking bread precisely because I did not like the fact that Korean bakeries put in all kinds of additives and chemicals. I do like some Korean breads - light, fluffy, soft, buttery, rich with light and soft crust and crumbs. But I don't like eating that kind of bread for my breakfast all the time. And most Korean people think artisan breads are baking failures (too tough, too chewy, too hard). That's why I wanted to attempt baking at home.
That means I have no one who could show me how the bread dough should look and feel like.... *sigh* but I am mighty glad I have TFL and wonderful bakers such as you to help me along!
I must try harder and practice a lot! Thank you for your input. Informed and encouraged me a lot!
I also live in a country where bread is not a staple (although it's popular as a snack and a quick lunch). Most bakeries sell the cotton-light, fluffy, enriched style of bread here too. Artisanal style breads are available, but expensive! Beyond my budget anyway.
I only bake a single small loaf about 3-4 times a month, so I still consider myself a beginner. It is a sometimes frustrating but ultimately fun, challenging and addictive hobby. I recently re-visited a recipe I failed miserably at multiple times. Making small changes based on new knowledge and techniques, I was so thrilled when I produced a nice, tall loaf instead of the yeasty bricks I remembered.
You'll get there!
I think you can reduce the temperature further to 190° after the oven spring (when most of the rising seems to happen in the first 20 minutes) or quickly cover the loaf with an aluminum foil tent to protect it from burning. I found that the light mounted at the top of the oven was just enough added heat to burn my loaf. I had a magic steam/convection oven when in Korea. I learned several tricks with that oven. Also because of the small size (mini oven) It was tricky to get the baking loaf at just the right height inside the oven and distribute heat evenly.
Why you are having success with no knead bread recipes might have a lot to do with dough hydration. I think that when you are kneading, it is easy to add too much flour to the recipe. Many older basic cup recipes will give the total amount of flour including that which is needed for kneading. Try holding back a cup of the flour to use with the kneading. Recipes with cups are often like this. Hold back a cup of flour and see what the texture of the mixed up dough is like before adding more flour or kneading more flour into it. Also, after mixing the dough so that all the flour in the bowl has been moistened, cover and let the shaggy blob absorb the liquids before starting to knead. 30 minutes rest will to wonders! And you will also find you need less flour on the table where you are working. Sometimes just a very thin coating of oil is all that is needed on the table. Later as skills improve, even that can be skipped.
It might also be worth mentioning that bread flour absorbs more water than All Purpose or cookie dough flour. Check the amounts of protein on the flour packages and compare. Normally higher protein means it will absorb more water. A dough made with the higher protein flour will not only look stiffer but be dryer and require more added water to achieve the same dough texture as a dough made with lower protein flour. So if the recipe asks for plain flour and bread flour is used, then the dough will need more water to be workable.
I've done that "no measuring" winging it for a while but I soon look for a way to be consistent. One of the biggest problems with not measuring ingredients is trying to get the salt amount just right for my tastes. Weighing the total flour and taking 1.8% for the amount of salt puts my loaves right where I want them to be.
Mini
Thank you for your tips! So the temp is too high... I knew it! :D I shall definitely try 190 C next time and the aluminum foil tent thing.
Last time I baked the sandwich bread, there was very minimal oven spring. The dough did rise like a monster during the second rise, even though I kept the rising time of 30 minutes. Would that be why there wasn't too much of oven spring?
And as I mentioned above.... the Korean "normal" bread flour has 20% protein... not a typo.... *sigh*.... Scary.... confusing..... And I was successful with the Bread Bible's sandwich bread recipe, which required AP flour, and I used Korean AP flour with 18% protein and the bread came out light and fluffy. I checked with the company website, and yes, the "usual" protein content is 13% for cake flour, 18% for AP flour, and 20% for bread flour. *Sigh*
I think I will stick with measuring everything for now. I've only begun to bake bread for about a month now. I still have a lot to learn, need to translate many things from Korean to English or just buy some good English baking books, learn all the terms and techniques, and try my best to find the right kind of ingredients or right kind of substitutes. Being a bilingual sometimes confuses the heck out of me in baking bread. No Korean "baker" hardly ever talk about hydration rate and protein rate.... And they use metric instead.... I am measuring things in grams quite comfortably now, but temperature conversion still throws me off.
And yes, I've noticed that whenever I try baking with bread flour, my dough is just stiff. I maybe putting too much flour or too little water. I will fight the urge to put more flour and try waiting for 30 minutes before kneading. I did not know flour with higher protein content would absorb more water. Thank you so much for your tips, Mini!
The recipe says to "knead until gluten develops and passes the windowpane test." No time specified. After kneading, the recipe says to put the dough in a bowl, cover with a piece of cling wrap, and "put the bowl in a warm place (around 40C) until the dough rises to 2.5 times its original size (around 60 minutes)." Then the recipe calls for the dough to "fold the dough to degas," and the divide the dough into 16 pieces with equal weight. Then those 16 dough balls are shaped into round smooth balls, 10-15 minutes rest, and then degasing and forming into smooth balls again, put into a square tin, then allowed to rise for 40-50 minutes (35C). Then the top of the dough is brushed with milk, baked at 180C for 20-25 minutes.
40 C is too high for bulk fermentation. Ideal rising tempearture is 80 F to 90 F (about 26.67 C to 32.22 C). I think some of the yeast were killed off during the first rise. I think there was no yeast left after shaping and during the proofing stage, so that's why the bread was hard after being baked. The alcohol smell was due to the high temperature because the yeast produced too much alcohol.
Where have you been rising the dough? Usually the weather here is warm, like 25 C to 26 C. I could get away by letting the dough rise in a bowl covered on the table in the kitchen. I'm sure there are other places to let the dough rise without making the dough too hot.
As for hand kneading, I knead for a few minutes until the dough stops sticking to my hands. Then I form it into a ball and poke it with my finger. If the dough bounces back, it's enough gluten development. For windowpane, like the other person said, you have to let the dough rest for some length of time before you stretch it out. If you try to stretch it immediately after kneading, it will tear because the dough has gone through kneading. The dough has to relax before it can be stretched. The dough is too tensed immediately after the kneading. I suspect since the flour is high in protein, you probably have to let the dough relax for an hour in order to stretch it thinly.
If I were you, I'd dump the recipe. haha Why try to make the recipe happen when it fails you every time? Even the directions seem to be wrong with the high proofing temperature. Maybe check out and try some of the recipes people have used here in the Baker Blogs section or other sections of the site.
And sooner than you think.
Lazybaker is absolutely right, 40C (104F) is too hot. If you were using your oven to ferment and or proof your bread, chances are that the surface temperatures of the bread were even hotter as the oven cycled on and off to heat. If so, then you might have been killing yeast, too. By the time you got to baking, when you get that last burst of yeast activity before it's killed by the high temp of the oven, you either had too little yeast left or no sugars for the yeast to feed on. Both produce the same result: poor to little rising and an overly dense crumb.
Lowering your fermenting and proofing temperatures should give you an immediate improvement. I proof at 75F (24C) in a warm closet; 90F is a little high for my tastes. Whatever temperature you choose, try to keep it as constant as possible.
Try making a small amount of simple recipe with just flour (150-200g should do it)/yeast/salt/water in a graduated bowl or large measuring cup, if you have one, and let it sit at room temperature. Check it every half hour and note the volume and look; poke it, take pictures, too, if you can. Let it go for 6 hours or so. This is overdoing it, but will show you what an under, correctly and overfermented dough looks like. Make another batch, let it ferment the appropriated time, prepare it for proofing and then let it sit for a long time . Check it as before after 30 min, 1 hr, then every hour for up to 4-6 hours. Again this will show you what under/correctly/overproofed dough looks like.
Here is another experiment you can do with your scale. Take a 1 cup measure and weigh it. Then scoop and fill it with your flour, scrape off the excess volume with a knife, then weigh it (scoop & flour). Subtract out the weight of the scoop and write it down. Do this a few times. Try settling the flour in the measuring cup before you scrape off the excess. Now, look at the weights. They are all one cup, but the weights can vary greatly. When I do this, I get 130-150g/cup. The flour company says I should get 124g. The point is, you want the same amout every time for all your ingredients.
So, take a recipe, figure out what it is calling for in grams, kilos, ounces or pounds for the dry ingredients and use the same amounts every time. You'll have to figure out how much water is appropriate for a particular amount and brand of flour, but once you do, it won't change much if at all.
A picture is worth a 1000 words, but a sample is worth a buzillion. :)
Good luck, You are going to be baking much better bread by the weekend!
I never thought of doing some experiment with yeast/salt/water and some flour. I shall try that. Yes, a sample is worth a buzillion. Couldn't agree enough on that one :D
And I've done flour measuring experiment myself when I got my scale! :D Before I joined this site, I read a lot of bakers here mentioning how weighing things is very important. So before I began baking bread, I got myself a nice scale and began measuring the dry ingredients and liquid ingredients in grams. The tare function does wonders for me :D I love my scale :D
After failing so many times with this particular recipe I mentioned above, I joined this site, got a Bread Bible's Pullman Loaf sandwich bread recipe from TFL, tried it, and it was wonderful! The crust was a bit burned but that's because I am still getting used to my convection oven. It is a Korean convection oven/microwave machine that has only microwave, grill, and convection options. I never bake cookies with it, because the machine just dries or burns up my cookies. (I have a mini non-convection oven for cookies :D ) But I've baked cheesecake and banana bread with it by tweaking oven temp and time. Must do some altering temp and time for bread too.
Thank you so much, PeterS! Will try baking again and hopefully I will be a baker sooner than I think I will be!
I thought 40C was too much too, cuz that's pretty hot to touch. Especially after reading Artisan Breads Every Day, I thought it was too strange that recipe would call for 40C.
For other recipes, I just let the dough rise at room temperature nowadays (because it's spring/early summer in Korea and it's warm enough). During last month when it was colder, I put the dough in a clean ball loosely covered with a piece of cling wrap and stick it in my oven (no preheating) with a huge mug with boiling hot water. But then again, I never had alchol-smelling brick-hard dough problem with other recipes.
As for windopane test, I had NO idea that I was supposed to wait awhile before stretching the piece of dough I had cut. I will do finger poke test you mentioned from now on. :D
Thank you so much for your tips and encouragement, lazybaker!