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Bread Baking for the Clueless but Curious

Contributed by Susan Gendreau
Sunday, 22 January 2006
by Susan Gendreau

Let’s assume you would like to bake bread. But it sounds like a lot of trouble, so you haven’t tried. Or you’ve tried and gotten a brick, not a loaf. The books – those gorgeous specialty cookbooks – call for equipment you don’t have and don’t want, and if you tried to follow their recipes nothing happened the way the page said it should. Bread seems so complicated. How do you know when it’s kneaded enough? How do you know when it’s risen enough? Uh, why didn’t it rise? You figure that if you aren’t a professional baker, you’re out of luck. But still you’d like to bake bread – if it’s not too much trouble.

Well. Bread baking can be a lot of trouble – if you want it to be. It can become an obsession. Some people (me, for instance) actually enjoy debating brands of flour or cake yeast versus dry yeast. Those same people buy the fancy equipment because it helps us make fancier bread. But people have baked yeasted bread for probably four thousand years and KitchenAid mixers have been around for only fifty. You don’t need one. You don’t need Calphalon loaf pans, a proofing box, the muscles of a linebacker or split-second timing. You don’t need to be an expert on kneading or rising to produce bread that’s much better than supermarket. And you don’t need to set aside a day to do it, either.

Here is what you do need: a one-cup measure, a loaf pan (supermarket Ecko is fine), flour, water, and yeast. Everything else is optional. The first time you bake, choose a day when you’ll be home a lot, so you can get a feel for the dough’s progress. But don’t be a slave to it; do your shopping, run your errands. Bread is not rocket science.

In the recipe below, almost anything not specified can be varied without wrecking the result — so relax.

Back to Basics Bread

First, wash your hands. You’ll need them.

3 cups flour

1 cup clean water at room temperature

2 teaspoons (most of one sealed foil packet) Fleischmann’s active dry yeast

1 teaspoon honey

½ teaspoon salt, if you like (most Americans will prefer this)

Check the expiration date on the yeast and make sure it’s still OK. It is? Good. Mix the yeast thoroughly with the flour (and salt, if any) in a largish mixing bowl. Dissolve the honey in the water. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour the water into it. With your fingers, or a wooden spoon, stir the water so that the flour washes off the sides of the hole into the water mixture without lumping up; if you get lumps anyway, don’t worry; we’ll fix them in a moment. When the water’s not really liquid anymore, get aggressive and mix in the rest of the flour.

Hold the bowl with one hand. With the other, mix the dough for several minutes, working around the bowl and from the bowl’s rim toward the center, until it gets smoother and cleans off the bowl’s sides. Sort of peel the outer edge of the dough toward the center and flatten it down hard, then repeat with part of the new edge. (That’s kneading, and it’s that simple.) If your dough has lumps, squeeze them to break them up. Make sure you work every part of the dough. Exactly how you do this, and how long, really don’t matter much. (Really.) Find a position that’s comfortable for you (I like to kneel on the floor and grip the bowl between my knees) and work the dough until you start to get tired.

Pat the dough into a fat cigar shape, put it in the loaf pan, and cover the pan with a clean towel that’s wet but wrung out. Put the covered pan somewhere out of drafts (I use the microwave oven) and leave it there to rise. That will take a minimum of a couple of hours and maybe longer, depending on several things (see the FAQ below). Check on it now and then as you go about your business.

When the dough has risen to just below the top of your loaf pan, and the center of it is just reaching the top, put it in a preheated 450 oven for 35-40 minutes. Slip it (cautiously – it’s hot) out of its pan and let it cool on a rack for at least half an hour before slicing it with a serrated knife. (Don’t cool it in the pan, slice it hot, or try to slice it with a regular knife – trust me.) Slap on the butter – or eat it plain; it will taste that good.

Now you’ve made bread. This recipe produces a loaf that doesn’t rise all that much, but has a thick, chewy crust and a wonderfully tender interior. Yum.

FAQ:

Q: My dough didn’t rise.

A: Not at all? Did you add the yeast? (Really. People forget.) If you did, and the dough didn’t rise at all, then either your yeast was dead when you started or you somehow killed it – probably by using water that was too hot. How hot is too hot? Most bread recipes call for proofing the yeast – dissolving the yeast in warm water before adding it to the dough. For a beginner that’s tricky, because yeast dies above 110F. Water that only feels warm to you can easily be hot enough to kill your yeast. And as long as your yeast is alive you don’t need to dissolve it in the water; it will dissolve in your dough and do its job just fine. Fleischmann’s Active Dry is very reliable if you use a sealed packet that’s inside the use-by date.

If you’re curious, or you have an old packet, you can test to see if your yeast is alive by adding a half teaspoon to a half cup of tepid water with a teaspoon of sugar. Mix to dissolve the sugar and let the mixture sit for fifteen minutes. If it isn’t bubbly and frothy, your yeast has expired (or your water’s too hot). If it’s OK, there’s still two teaspoons in the packet for your bread.

Q: My dough took a very long time to rise.

Be patient; in a cool kitchen the rise can take hours. If you added salt, the dough will rise more slowly as well. If it goes all day, it will taste all the better for it. The warmer the dough, from the water or a warm rising place, the faster it will rise. But stick to room temperature for your first loaves; if the yeast is too hot it will die, and if it’s just short of too hot your bread will rise quickly but taste like cardboard. Slow-rise bread is tastier and less tricky to make; it just takes longer. If you let it rise at room temperature and by the time you have to go out it isn’t up to the top of the pan, leave it rising until you can get back to it. The bread will probably be fine. Don’t let it intimidate you.

Also, the more yeast you add, the faster the rise. But too much yeast will produce a distinct yeasty taste. I usually only use one teaspoon per loaf and let the dough rise all day, or start in the evening and let it rise overnight. Tastes much better.

Q: can I use Fleischmann’s Quick-Rising Yeast instead, or bread machine yeast? Or a bread machine?

Sure, if you like cardboard bread. The quicker the rise, the blander the taste. You don’t bake quality bread in 90 minutes. As for bread machines, any real bread baker will tell you they’re the spawn of the One Down Below. They produce lousy bread and they’re expensive. If you want to spend that kind of money, forget baking your bread and just buy from an artisan bakery.

Q: what’s the difference between white flour and wheat?

Wheat bread is better for you – a lot better – but white flour is easier for a beginner to work with; it needs a reliable one cup water to three cups flour and gives lighter bread than wheat with less work. Different batches of wheat flour need varying amounts of water, and you may have to tinker with quantities to get dough that feels right – though you will learn what feels right very quickly. Experiment with brands of wheat flour, too; their taste varies. You can also add oatmeal, rye, and other flours to the mix. The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book contains a lot of useful information on whole grain bread baking.

Q: where do I go from here?

Anywhere you want! Was there something about your bread that could be better – its lightness, taste, texture? Bake this recipe a few times; experiment with the effects of small changes. Most ovens don’t heat evenly; try different places in yours. More kneading will make your bread finer-textured and might raise it more; a little more or less flour can make a surprising difference. Most Americans are used to the taste of salt in their bread, but try leaving it out; you might like it. Your bread will be distinctly tastier if you use bottled or filtered water. You can try taking the dough out of the pan after it rises, kneading it a few times, and raising the dough a second time; that will produce finer-textured bread. You can experiment with things to add or leave out – my signature bread, the one everyone asks me to bring to parties, includes potatoes, eggs, milk and butter; it’s not health food but it tastes awesome.

Of course you can try those cookbooks now; you’ve got the basics. Some of my favorite recipes are in The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. They use only whole-grain recipes – no white flour – and the book includes very detailed directions on every aspect of baking light, tasty whole-grain bread; it’s a good place for a beginner to go next. Pssst – the recipes work just fine with some white flour added to them, too. And of course there are many other books as well. Have fun! Copyright@Susan Gendreau 2006.