Hi!
i have only recently started making my own bread to fill up the spare time i've been having recently. But it seems i'm running into some problems.
Every attempt thus far hasn't been great and i'm getting a bit clueless as to where it went wrong. Every time my bread ends up being pretty dense and chewy (not bad tasting, but not light and well-baked as in the video tutorials i've seen up to this point). I've included some pictures of the end result.
Now, what i have noticed is that my dough never anything like in the videos (i.e. shiny, smooth and elastic). Instead, i'm often left with a dough that still has small "lumps" of dough in it, but i can never get that smooth dough, despite kneading consistently for 10 to 15 minutes.
I use the following ingredients (as instructed by a dutch recipe from home).
375g of bread flour
230ml water
8g salt
7.5g of yeast
5g of butter
I use Quick rise yeast (due to a lack of anything else in the country where i live atm). So what i end up doing is i mix the dry yeast directly with the flour, than add the salt and mix it some more. Following that, i add the (room temperature to almost molten) butter and slowly start adding the water while stirring the flour. I have also tried making a "flour valley" and pouring water little by little in the middle while adding flour.
The first few tries i got a rather thick, dense and almost dry dough. Today, i tried adding a bit more water and it was somewhat better, but not a great deal.
After roughly 10 minutes of kneading, my dough still doesn't look nor feel as elastic is it supposed to be, so i just put it to rise. It did actually double in size, so at least the yeast is working. Since i've read that quick rise yeast can and should only rise once, I just preheat the oven at 200° and leave it to bake for 30-40 minutes after the first rise.
I do make a few cross incisions on the top to prevent bursting on the sides, and i also place a small bowl of water in the oven, under the loaf.
It ends up like this. As you can see it doesn't look light inside and the bottom is also underbaked compared to the top (but that could be due to a rather unreliable oven though)
Any help is appreciated,
thanks!
It gives a good starting point for a diagnosis.
First, the dough is at the dryer end of the range for this style of bread; only 61%. An enriched bread like this (contains fats and/or sugars) is frequently baked in a pan, rather than as a hearth loaf. That isn't a rule of any sort, it's just what seems more typical. You may wish to experiment with pushing the hydration level closer to 65% (weight of water divided by weight of flour). The dough will be softer and somewhat stickier, but still very manageable. The softness will allow the bubbles to inflate more than they do in the present somewhat stiff dough. You can always push the water quantity higher, if you like.
Without knowing anything about your kneading technique, it is suprising to hear that the dough is still rough and lumpy after 10-15 minutes of kneading. Do you have any information about the protein content of the flour? What kneading technique do you use? And, how forcefully do you knead? I ask because I often see students who are new to baking gently massage their dough as if it were a new-born infant, thinking that's what is meant by kneading. Kneading a stiff dough like this requires quite a bit of force.
You might also want to use autolyse to help the dough along. I have to run so don't have time to explain that process. Please use the Search tool at the upper right corner of the page and you'll learn more than you ever though possible about autolyse.
Best of luck with future bakes.
Paul
Welcome to the Fresh Loaf -- Floyd Mann is our host.
I indorse that which Paul has written. I haven't heard about only one rise for the instant yeast. I would certainly give the dough a try at a bulk ferment before shaping. Bulk ferment until the dough has doubled in volume. Gently degas the dough and shape the loaf. Let the dough rise again until the dough passes the finger poke. ( Press two fingers gently into the dough and release, if the imprint takes several seconds to recover the dough is ready.) Preheat the oven for about an hour if you have a baking stone. Place the dough into the preheated oven on the shelf above a pan of boiling water. I would use a higher baking temperature (235°C for 15 minutes then remove the water and drop the temperature to 175°C). Bake until the interior temperature reaches 91° to 94°C. Perhaps turning the loaf during the bake would eliminate the white area on the top.
Happy baking,
Ford
Hire an expert to help you! You can do that pretty much anywhere in the world if you can get bread baking text books written specifically for students. I do not mean a bread cookbook. I really mean a text book for a school's course in bread baking. Such a book is invariably written by an expert whose interest is to take students with little knowledge into the realm of sufficient knowledge to make them pretty good. For my money, a good text book is written to be read and practiced from starting on page 1 and moving on to the end at which time you'll have practiced and practiced according to a well thought out plan of attack on the subject.
Think of this: professional bakers take courses in schools to learn their trade. Why shouldn't you? The advantage of a text book is that you can study from it at your own pace. Also consider this: as much as this website is full of wonderful and well-meaning bread bakers, how can you know whose answers to your questions are "expert" and whose aren't. You really cannot tell until you're quite experienced yourself. So how are you to know who's likely to have a good answer to your question? If you choose a text book, you've invited its author into your kitchen to teach you his trade. Now you should know that I've been learning to bake breads for the past many decades. I've picked up a few things along the way from bread cook books, videos, this website, and so on. But I've never learned so much so quickly as I have in hands-on courses and from text books.
If this seems like a good idea, look at these works: DiMuzio's Breadbaking, Hamelman's Bread, and the handbook hyperlinked at the top of every page on this website. The first two are often available in a library system. The handbook is available to you since you're already reading this website. I sorely wish I'd taken my own advice when I first started out. I'd be so much farther along than I am now. Looking back on who I was back in my late teens, I wish I'd had the DiMuzio text. I think I'd have ignored the Hamelman book as being far to intense. But maybe you'll be happier with the Hamelman. In any case, once you've picked a text consider it your primary path to knowledge. Work your way through it at a pace that makes you happy. Go astray now and then at your pleasure but always refer to it. It's good to learn a path before you stray from it.
While you're on your expert's path, don't hesitate to keep reading this website, looking at all the bread baking videos you can find, and practicing a lot. It's so much fun. Isn't that what it's all about?
thanks for the advice! I'm trying a few things different this time around. Used APF, added more water (66%, 247 ml instead of 210). I also mixed it different. Put everything together in the bowl, added the water and ran through it a few time. Then i let it rest for a good 15 minutes, followed by roughly 10 minutes of kneeding (by folding it and slamming it on the surface, rinse and repeat). The dough felt a lot smoother than last time, but still not great (practice i reckon).
I'm currently letting it rise for an hour, than i'll punch it down, shape it into a baking form and let it rise for another 45 minutes before baking it.
hopefully the result will be an improvement over last time. I'll post of a picture of today's efforts when it's done to let you judge for yourself if it's any better.
it's not great (yet), but here it is. At least it looks a lot better than the previous one, haven't cut it yet (cooling off). It might look a bit flat, but that is because i just bought a baking shape and i had no idea how much is required to completely fill it (next time i'll try with 500g of flour instead of 375).
I'd suggest that you leave out the butter. Five grams (really?) is a minute amount but all it's doing, especially adding it before the water, is preventing the flour it soaks into from absorbing any water and thus hindering gluten development.
Yeah, i've left out the butter entirely in the last few attempts and instead just grease my mixing bowl with a bit of oil (to avoid sticking during rising). I don't actively add oil as an ingredient to the dough.
i've been giving a lot more tries recently, but my bread is still a bit too dense for my taste. I wanted to ask, roughly how long should my dough rise (1st & 2nd) time if i use quick rise yeast? I'm starting to suspect that 2 times an hour respectively might be a bit too long and is causing the yeast to lose it's effectiveness?
I live in Taiwan for now, a country that is generally quite humid and warm (although right now it only hits 20° C). So currently I leave the dough to rise in a lightly preheated oven (at about 38-40°C).
I'd really want the bread to become a deal lighter than it is. I've tried adding more water (67% max), kneading a bit longer, letting it rise a bit longer. But the result is usually the same. Maybe using a different type/brand of yeast might work? Although yeast is a difficult thing to come by here in Taiwan, with 99% of all stores only selling this one particular type of quick rise yeast.
How long your dough takes to rise depends on how much yeast you use: less yeast, more time; more yeast; less time. And most recipes suggest too much yeast and too little fermentation time.
> ...currently I leave the dough to rise in a lightly preheated oven (at about 38-40°C).
There's part of your problem, if not all of it, then. That's way too hot. Try around 25°C, for at least the first hour. After that, lower, down to domestic refrigerator temperatures, is OK but you should try to avoid letting it get any warmer than that. Your final prove can be done at the sort of temperature you're using now but avoid a too rapid rise in temperature. For example, if you do ferment in the fridge, don't take the dough out of the fridge and put it straight into a warmed oven.
67% hydration is probably OK, depending on the flour. As you gain experience, you'll find that you can take that to 70% or above and your bread will benefit from it.
Also, less kneading is usually better than more and (up to a point) the more liquid you use in the dough the less kneading it will require.