Day 17: Bread basics

Hello fork musketeers!

Monday was a rather busy day, so we started bread today.

Don't mind the weird personalized baguette.

Bread basics

If you've never made bread before, here's something you may not have thought of; bread is alive. At least when you're making it, not when it's finished baking. This is because the process of making bread uses yeast, a bacteria also used in wines for fermentation.

What is fermentation?

Fermentation is essentially the process of bacteria, such as yeast, consuming sugar and farting out carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol.  If you google some images of rising bread, you might see breads that have bubbles in them and, if you've made bread, it will have a faint alcohol smell. This is the exact same process used for making wines and beers, although it's been tweaked for making breads.

Yeast is considered a leavener; just like baking soda and baking powder helps doughs rise, yeast does the same thing. The advantage yeast has for breads is it gives your product a more complex flavour during the fermentation process. When you bake your bread, the yeast continues to produce alcohol and CO2 until it eventually dies due to the high heat. The remaining gas heats up and expands; this is what causes your bread to rise.

A basic bread recipe is flour; liquids (water and/or milk) and yeast. For home bakers, you can buy, I think, two different versions of yeast at your grocery store: dry active yeast and instant dry yeast. They're both very similar but dry active yeast needs to be dissolved in warm water whereas instant yeast can be added directly to the dough. At the shop we used a different version of yeast. I'm not sure what it was called, but it was in a solid form and kind of chunky. But that's a topic for another time.

When you see a baker's recipe for simple bread, you might see something like this:

1. Flour 100%
2. Water 70%
3. Salt 1.5%
4. yeast 1.5%

For the uninitiated, it might look weird and confusing as hell. Aren't percentages supposed to add up to 100? This thing is 173%! What's going on?!!

It turns out the percentages are based on how much flour you're using. So if you wanted to use 500g of flour, your amounts would look like this:

1. 500g flour (100%)
2. 350g water (70% of 500)
3. 7.5g salt and yeast (1.5% of 500)

The thing about making bread is it not always the same all-year around. Humid weather will mean less liquids; colder weather will mean more yeast, etc. Making bread is more of an art than following the recipe blindly.

If you're using an electric mixer, the temperature of your ingredients will play a more important role in your breadmaking endeavours. While some recipes will recommend to reserve some flour to adjust the dough, adding flour will change the ratio of of your ingredients. So Chef C told us to use water to adjust the consistency instead.

When you're making bread, it's important to know the overall temperature of your dough when you're done. For regular homebakers it may not be a concern, but if you want consistent results you should be more aware of the temperature of your dough.

In general, you aim for a certain temperature - Chef C gave us 69˚C to shoot for - and consider the temperature of: your flour; your environment; your pre-ferment (if using) and use your water to adjust the difference. So if your environment is 21˚C and everything's room temperature, it should be 21+21+21 (pre-ferment) = 63. So the difference is 6˚C. Your water should be pretty cold. I don't think I quite understand this principle very well, but I did find a more technical link that talks about this in more detail. I'll have to ask more questions tomorrow.

Making your dough

You're either making your dough by hand or using a mixer. Kneading by hand is simpler and it will require more physical effort; however it's practically impossible to overknead by hand. If you have electronic assistance, it's obviously easier on you but overkneading becomes a possibility.

We made our dough with the mixer, so lucky us. Whether you're doing it by hand or with the mixer, you want to make sure you do a few things.

1. Don't put the salt and/or sugar on top of the yeast. Remember; salt and sugar are antiseptics and yeast is a bacteria. You and your yeast will be the losers if your yeast and salt/sugar touch each other.
2. Mix slowly to incorporate all your ingredients/moisten the flour.
3. When everything's together, start kneading or put the mixer on a slightly higher speed.

There are various ways to check when your dough is ready; it should look smooth and supple when you roll it into a ball. I've tried the window pane test in my own bread adventures with varying degrees of success.

Eehhhh not so sure here

Oh ok it looks fine. Cool!

Then you have to let it proof. All this means is letting the yeast do some work. Just remember that the dough can stick to the sides, so feel free to put a bit of oil and a towel on top.

When it's done proofing, I like to do the finger test. All you need to do is flour your finger and poke a hole straight down the middle of your dough. Don't be shy now.

Poke!

The hole your finger create should stay. If it shrinks into a small dimple quickly, it means your dough hasn't risen enough. Just put the towel back on and continue your day. If not, you're ready to proceed to punch down. This removes excess gas.

In this case, we divided the dough into pain de campagne and baguette. You want to form it into a ball by gently tucking the edges into the centre. Flip it over and drag the ball across your floured surface to even out the bottom.

After this, just let your dough rest for a few minutes before shaping. In the case of the baguette, you need to gently roll the ball into a log. Just roll it from the centre to the outside and repeat until it's the length you want. Try to make it as even as possible, otherwise it'll turn out like mine! When you're done, let the dough rise again until doubled in volume.

Baking pain de campagne and baguette

For pain de campagne and baguette, you need a lot of humidity inside your oven. Additional humidity will give you a really nice crust as well as help the bread expand. You don't want water though; you want ice cubes. Due to the high oven temperature, the ice cubes sublimates - going from a solid (ice) to a gas (steam) almost immediately. Throwing water in there will just boil over.

For the pretty details on top, you want to put your dough on your tray and put a bit of flour on top. Then slice away with your knife. I didn't put flour on my pain de campagne when I cut it (whoops!). This is why it looks kinda funny.

Alternatively, you can put a tray in your pre-heated oven to get it really hot. This would mean you have a tray where you do your details and then slide your products onto the hot tray. This is how we did it.

That's it for today. In addition to these basic breads, we also made our doughs for croissants and brioche; which we will make tomorrow. So stay tuned!