Baking Bread during a Pandemic – doing as little as possible
One of the unanticipated outcomes of a lot of people being stuck at home non-stop and of having less than reliable access to fresh groceries is that there is a lot of bread baking going on. You see it in YouTube videos, you read about it and you hear of family and friends who have said they have or are going to make up a sourdough starter. You hear that stores have run out of flour and it seems like yeast is about as rare a find as toilet paper. All of this bread baking may well become one of the enduring impacts of this crisis. We could finally as a nation crave and demand good bread. And if we can’t get it in stores (hint: for most of us you can’t) we will more and more likely simply bake it ourselves.
I think this was only the second loaf I made. Great and chewy but still an airy crumb, tons of flavor. Crust had good flavor but not terribly hard.
So what can I add to the chorus of those out there trying to tell you what you can do and how you can do it? Well, mainly I come at this pursuit with a firm belief that nature can do a lot of the heavy lifting. Whereas instead, the modern world mainly thinks we must do most of this manually or chemically, with a lot of work, precise workflows and personal attention being added into the process. This let nature-do-the-work is how I garden for instance. I don’t do a whole lot; I try in fact to do very little; I let nature do as much as it can.
Indeed, there is a larger theme here that echos throughout many of my posts. We often accept the trade of doing things faster and more efficiently instead of doing them with pleasure and well. We fly in planes for instance because they are faster, but how often do we ask whether they really make for a better trip? Bread, one of the world’s oldest and most powerful metaphors for life, should be done well, not just faster.
So with that point of view, I launched myself into learning how to bake good bread. Doing very little to make a loaf. And hopefully the less I do the better the product. I will tell you right up front; I was successful. And the amount of time spent making a loaf was no more than half the time you will take to just read this Dispatch. [Update after a year, here is what I have learned see One year later.]
What I learned is that most (without any actual support, I estimate something like 90%) of what you read about or hear about to bake good bread are relatively modern innovations designed to allow someone to wake up and decide right then to have fresh bread on the table that same day. They have to rush the process. As a result, a lot of carefully orchestrated tasks need to be done, rigidly following a timer and instructions, with lots of steps, each specific and different from before. These “innovations” make all of this bread making very intimidating. Paradoxically, our desire to make bread more quickly, to fit into our efficient, modern and on-the-clock world, has resulted in our having to do so much more work.
Instead, if you accept that it can take longer from start to finish, if you let a natural daily rhythm become established, most of that extra work and precise timing simply disappear. You won’t be slave to rigid schedules that tie you down to reappear in the kitchen at frequent, but unevenly spaced intervals. You won’t need to tell your computer/web/smartphone-based household assistant to remind you to go do something new and complex some 75 minutes later.
Rather, you will let the whole thing fit into whatever schedule works for you. Letting a first rise for instance occur overnight, over 8 hours, or 12 hours, or 18 hours, or even 24 hours, whichever you decide fits into your own life. You will own the process; it won’t own you. And you will discover that slower is better, not only for you but for the bread you are making.
Before I lay out the basic idea and “recipe” (I have grown to dislike that term, but it is hard to come up with another one, I find that mainly you will take this information and make the process your own after just a few outings, as such these are guidelines not a recipe) I want to first describe all the things which I have learned that you don’t need to do.
First of these is kneading. Yes, kneading, the classic learned skill of bakers everywhere, is something that has been added to the bread making process simply to accelerate getting from beginning to end in a few hours. You don’t need to do it if you just let nature do it for you. What kneading does to the dough (creating and strengthening gluten for instance); a little extra time in a long, slow first rise will do just as well, if not better. (I want to be clear, there might be some added value in kneading which my limited experience doesn’t yet understand, but from what I have seen, just letting time pass will produce a dough very much “gluten developed” and so I am saying here to give that a try and simplify things enormously.)
Proofing the yeast. Don’t bother. Unless you are using yeast that expired a long time ago, just throw it in. If you have any concerns about whether your yeast found in the far back of your fridge with an expiration date back before 2010 is still good, then put some in a little sugar water and see if it bubbles up in 10 or so minutes. It probably will. If so, then just use that jar or packet as I describe here. No need for an extra step. The idea that every day a baker goes and grabs the same jar of commercial yeast (which contains billions of yeast organisms mixed randomly across each spoonful) and proofs the contents of that jar once again before using it -- is pure nonsense. Over the long rise times used here, your yeast will be fine without mixing with water first.
And speaking of yeast, you wont be using nearly as much here as you will find in normal recipes. That’s because we aren’t in a hurry. Here, your precious and hard to find jar or packet of yeast will last about 6 times longer. If your yeast supply is your main constraint on production, you can make a lot more bread from it by simply slowing the process down. Even within the recipe given here, you can cut your yeast in half by going even longer.
You don’t need to Autolyze, which was a new step invented back around 1970. It was added to recipe books to take into account that kitchens were increasingly using motorized mixers. To give the dough a little extra time to hydrate and settle down before being manhandled in the mixers, someone came up with the idea to first mix the water and flour together and let it sit or rest for 45 minutes or an hour or so before adding salt and yeast (the recipes tend to be very precise on this time period for some reason, which is the first indication that this is modern nonsense; picture some peasant in 1352 AD setting his or her kitchen timer for 45 minutes before moving on). This step is called the autolyze. Forget it. Get rid of the mixer (or aggressive kneading) and you get rid of this step.
Using a mixer. What I am going to tell you to do can be done in about half the time as it takes to just get the mixer out and set it up and then afterwards clean it. That doesn’t count the time taken actually mixing the dough in the mixer. You don’t need a mixer. In fact, you don’t want to use a mixer. It over mixes the dough for the long rise you are going to use. Mixers are like motorized kneading, you don’t need either one.
Coming back into the kitchen and punching down the dough every so often on some insane schedule. Just don’t. Go live your life. Once you mix it up, just leave it alone for half a day or thereabouts, it isn’t too finicky.
Lots of ingredients in precisely measured proportions. Nope. You need just water (though having a filter to get rid of chorine in tap water is nice), flour (All Purpose -- or AP -- is fine, try and use unbleached, but don’t worry about it too much, bread four is nice too but again, don’t worry about it), salt for flavor and a tiny bit of yeast. No oils, fat or butter, no milk, no cheese, no herbs, no garlic, no sugar, no honey, no sweeteners at all, no eggs, and no nuts, cinnamon or raisins. Those can be used in different recipes, but let’s just start with the basics first. And some of these, like sugar, are used, once again, simply to speed things up, to put the little yeast organisms on a sugar high.
These four basic ingredients, along with sufficient time, make bread that you will devour with pleasure.
A special warm place to let the dough rise. The more I’ve done this the more I realize that this really isn’t very important. If you are in a hurry to start and make bread in a few hours, the temperature of where the dough sits and rises is critically important. If you are letting it rise overnight, not so much. In fact, if you let it rise in a cooler rather than warm spot, it will sit there very nicely for longer and thereby fit into whatever schedule you decide on and how much yeast you want to use that day. Just be sure the temperatures are even, out of the sun and note what works and what doesn’t for you and your timing.
You want your long first rise to hit a peak when done and before moving to the next step. A warm place or too much yeast could mean you are past peak when you wake up and go into the kitchen to see how things are going. (If the dough looks a little concave in the bowl, higher on the edges than in the middle, (see my photo below of the once-risen dough as an example) it means it was higher and now is settling, that means it is past peak. That shouldn’t be too much of an issue but take note to either use less yeast next time or find a cooler spot.)
Get to know your ingredients and the local environment of your kitchen at room temperature and conform your process and ingredients to that. More yeast if you have a cooler place or plan on shorter rise time, less yeast if warmer or longer. Up to you; you’ll figure it out quickly on your own. (Be mindful that different seasons can change things.)
Don’t worry about some special place set aside for this. The only reason I put my rising dough away is so that my son wont come into the kitchen and throw it out as some bad science experiment that Dad is running.
My first time making a shaped bread, here a boule. I used the same recipe but just had to manipulate the dough between first and second rising to create this shape and then let it rise in a bowl to keep this shape. Then baked in a preheated Dutch Oven.
Shaping bread dough into all those wonderful shapes. I get the appeal of that. But lets get real here. You want some really good bread. You are stuck at home and you want that bread NOW. You have some things to learn about how to just do that. Learn all of that and enjoy the bread that results. After you accomplish that, this basic recipe can and will make most of the other loaves you see coming out of French and Italian and German bakeries with just very minor tweaks. A bit more technique is needed, but it isn’t that different. Do bread in a loaf pan first and enjoy it. Then look up some You Tubes on how to shape all these other loaves.
Sticky fingers. I won’t lie; the first time you do this you will have sticky fingers at one point. I did. And after the first time I haven’t again. In fact, I barely even touch my dough anymore. You learn fast that a light touch does everything you need to do. Again, nature does all the real work.
What about sourdough starters? You’ve perhaps heard that the grand pinnacle of baking bread is to use sourdough starters harvested from the wild yeast in your air at home and living on the flour. Starters are known by a lot of different names, some are pretty dry and some very wet. They all are a mixture of just water and flour that has been allowed to ferment and nurture the natural, wild yeast and bacteria in the air and in the flour. The result is fermented dough that is maintained, periodically fed and stored to be brought out and added to the main body of your bread dough to add both the needed yeast and a nice sour flavor.
My own Sourdough starter on the first day that I had substantial activity and then fed it with new flour and water. After feeding the level was at the rubber band, after 3 hours it had doubled to where it is shown.
And well, yes, there is something to all of this. The wild yeast and bacteria in sourdough is quite different from using just commercial yeast. But as with many modern things, this gets overplayed to the point where people obsess over feeding and maintaining their starters. Worrying over starting one. Waiting for weeks after starting up a starter before making even the first loaf of bread. Following precise instructions and then it doesn’t work anyway (sometimes the wild yeast don’t colonize or bad bacteria take hold). Who owns whom here?
Sourdough starters are a tool; that’s it. Don’t obsess.
In fact, once you get one going it is entirely possible to altogether do away with the whole starter as a separate beast living in a jar in your kitchen. But how can you make and keep sourdough bread going without some prized starter that you feed and watch over for so many years that you pass it down to your grandchildren?
This is how much old dough I reserved to make the next dough. This is 80g
Well, you just take some small portion of the dough with which you are making today’s bread and reserve it for use in the next batch of dough. If making that new batch right away, then you just throw it in the new batch of dough. If making the new batch of dough later, then just refrigerate the reserved dough until you are making bread again. It will keep fine. No starter is needed here that must be fed and maintained separately. No fuss. And it will grow to be just as wild and sour as anything the typical sourdough starter would be. That old dough will add all the yeast you need.
Commercial dried yeast after all is also just another modern innovation, having been around now for about 150 years. Before this, leavened bread was mostly likely made from old dough, from a succession of old doughs going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Bread wasn’t just made once a week or at another blue moon. For many people it was their main source of nutrients and when one loaf was done another had to in the making.
Because of this, I suspect that the whole starter-as-a-separate-jarred-thing-on-your-kitchen-counter (or in the fridge) also was the product of the modern industrial age over the last 100 to 150 years. These starters go by a lot of different names depending on the country of baker origins and these exotic names imply a sort of artisan authenticity. Doesn’t matter, they are all just fermented starters that facilitate making bread fast.
When we decided we wanted to make bread faster, we came up with the idea that the fermented portion of bread dough could be added in at a later stage in the overall process, using already fermented dough kept aside for this special purpose. By doing this we still will get that fermented sour flavor and have available the wild yeast in our dough without having to also ferment from the beginning today’s dough itself. By adding in already fermented starter we did not need to ferment our main body of dough with a long rise. The whole thing could be done faster. A lot faster.
But that isn’t what people did before the modern world. Too much work and fuss. Sourdough starter, for all of its grounding in the natural world of wild yeast, lets us make bread in one day that has some of the natural elements of fermented bread traditionally made over a two day period (or more). Although a sourdough starter does more than just allow for a quicker loaf of bread, it often gets used for that purpose. You get fermented taste without waiting for fermentation to actually occur. As a separate ingredient to add to the dough you actually bake with, it too can be merely an accelerant, just like the other modern “innovations.”
But let’s assume you want to begin a starter, which I think is actually a good thing to do. It is your path to having wild yeast and sourdough flavor. It will eventually be part of what you will want to know about. You cant get a hold of your local wild yeast any other way. But that doesn’t mean we have to buy into all the work and fuss.
And, don’t wait to start making bread until your homegrown starter is ready a week or two later. It wont really be entirely mature for maybe around a month anyway, weeks after it can theoretically be used. Full potency can be delayed quite a bit after if looks like it is workable.
Instead, start making bread right now with yeast that you’ve begged or stolen from your friends or family so that by the time your sourdough starter is ready you have some idea of how to make bread the old fashioned way, what dough and bread should look like at different stages and how to work with flour, water and handle dough.
Sensible people don’t go out and buy and drive a Porche 911 after you just got your learner’s permit. You start with the easy car first. Don’t wait to bake bread until you have a starter going. There is a lot to learn and enjoy along the way. Notably, there is a lot of great bread to eat.
So, we are a long ways into this before I have laid out just what I actually do. But I think it was important to dispel what you have likely heard or read about before. Because otherwise you simply will not believe how easy making good bread really is.
Here is what I do; it just takes a few minutes a day, on a schedule of my own choosing, in a kitchen as warm or as chilled as it just happens to be already. Get out the following ingredients:
Flour, water (again, filtered is nice), table salt and active dry yeast.
Really amazing toast
Before I get into the proportions lets take another detour and talk about amounts of bread. In these times especially, I don’t want to waste food. I don’t want to make up a loaf of bread and eat only half of it before it goes stale. My supply of flour and yeast is pretty good but still finite. And as importantly, this bread is so good you wont want to eat it at any but its best state. For the same reason, I hate buying store bread because I am buying it only for me and I know it will mostly be wasted. Or I will eat too much.
So I make here tiny little loaves. Just enough for me to have a sandwich at lunch, have bread or toast with jam and butter in the evening with tea, and then toast in the morning. Then I make another loaf. (It makes the best toast you have ever eaten.)
My mini Pullman Pan, with lid, and the loaf that came out of it. Named Pullman because these were used in the old Pullman train dining cars to make daily fresh bread for passengers. This was my third loaf made. Perfect size for one person to finish off in 24 hours. They also make other pullman pans that are twice as long and three times as long. I have a few of these, but I like this one best, with the diagonal corrugated sides. Heavy duty and easy to remove the bread.
Since it only takes a couple of minutes overall (quite literally, after a few loaves I was spending less than 10 minutes on the entire process, which includes the baking and clean up) and having a daily pattern is nice, these tiny loaves work perfectly for just me. If you are making bread for two or more people you will double or triple most parts of this recipe, but not necessarily the yeast. I will go into that. If you don’t have the tiny loaf pan I have (a quarter sized Pullman pan, 4” by 4” by 4”) but only have a 9x5 loaf pan, typically used for meatloaf and banana bread, you will want to roughly triple this (though maybe only double the yeast). My niece is going to try using a 5” ramekin in order to make the small loaves for just her.
So finally, here is my recipe.
Around 1 cup or maybe a bit more than 200g four (I started with AP but now have graduated to half AP and half bread flour, with sometimes a little whole wheat thrown in (1/4 cup only, it’s up to you). Just start with whichever white flour you have available and then experiment from there.
Around 5 oz (or around 150 ml or g) of water at whatever temperature you decide to use. Mine is room temperature coming out of my filter jug on the counter. Don’t use all the water at once; you may not need it all.
1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt. The regular stuff in the round blue container works just fine. This is for flavor only so try it and see what you like.
1/4 tsp active dry yeast. (If you have one of the other types of yeast don’t sweat. It will work and you will adjust as you go anyway; these days if you have any yeast at all you are ahead of the game. Pay attention to what you use and how it turns out and then see if you need more or less the next time.)
Put the dry stuff in a bowl. You can keep the salt and the yeast apart initially since yeast doesn’t care for salt. But I bet if you tried a controlled experiment it wouldn’t matter a bit.
A “shaggy dough,” just at the moment it firms up and grabs the dough stuck to the sides. This is where you stop.
Stir the dry stuff up so it is mixed in. Then add about half the water and stir it up with a soupspoon or the wrong side of a wooden spoon. Try and hydrate as much flour as that much water will allow and then add more water only as you need to. You only want all the dough to be wet enough to stick together into a loose and rough ball. If that ball that is forming starts to grab the flour on the edges of the bowl you are pretty much done. This is called “shaggy” dough. It is rough looking, not smooth.
That is it. Once all the dough forms into a rough mass, stop!
If it starts to glisten, it probably has too much water in it. Don’t worry about using all the water. If you do however use more than you need, which is inevitable at first, that’s okay too. It wont hurt anything but only make it marginally harder to work after the first rise. You will see; it isn’t a big deal. In fact, although more water will make it harder to work with in the second stage, it will actually improve the flavor and texture of the bread. More water will facilitate more fermentation. But for now try to stop with as little water as needed.
Now cover the bowl with a lid or some plastic wrap, maybe cover that with a towel and put into the spot you’ve chosen. That should be draft-free and steady in temperature; but again, it need not be a special warm spot. Let sit for anywhere from 8 hours to 24. The longer, the more interesting and complex the bread flavor. A good start would be 12 hours. So for instance I often do this step at 8 o’clock in the evening (it will take a few minutes only) and I do the next step in the morning while I make tea.
Same dough as above but after a 12 hour first rise.
So, in the morning (or 8 to 24 hours later) you pull out the bowl. That shaggy dough will have settled down into a much more viscous, wet and bubbly dough. It will look a lot more liquid than any other bread dough you’ve seen in pictures. All the gluten development has occurred. You will be able to tell that as you scrape this dough out of the bowl and it comes out with stringy integrity.
Plop it down onto a board or clean counter that has a little flour on it. (As I have gotten better I use less and less flour at this point.) Gently with floured fingers pull it over itself, folding it over a few times. That is it. Then plop it all into a pan. (A dough scraper is a great and cheap investment.) The first time you do this step, this will be where you get sticky fingers. Later you will see that if gentle you wont. There is a surface tension to the dough that you will learn to exploit.
Cover and set the loaf pan in your rising spot (but here being warm is bit more important) and let it rise a second time. I hide mine in a cabinet that has an underneath light that warms it up a bit. This second rising will be anywhere from 1 and ½ hours to 3. That will depend on warmth and how active the yeast still is. You will figure out the optimum after 2 or 3 loaves. Really, don’t worry.
And it will depend on your kitchen and your own ingredients so it is no use for me to specify much in detail. (For instance bread four and AP flour will react to the second rise a little differently, bread flour will rise maybe a bit higher.) You don’t want to follow my instructions here, you want to look at the dough and get to know it. If you want to be closer to 1 and ½ hours then set aside in a warmer spot. You are in control.
After the dough has risen to about where you want the baked bread level to be (pan bread, unlike shaped and free standing loaves, wont rise a lot in the oven), then preheat the oven to 450 degrees (F) and when ready, bake for 25 minutes. (A couple of minutes more if recipe doubled or tripled, you will see what works in your oven.) Should be nicely brown but not dark. Probably can thump the top and hear a thuddish sound.
Take out and let cool in pan for a bit just so you wont burn yourself extracting it. It will also come out of the pan more easily once cooled a bit and it recedes from the sides. Then let cool before cutting.
You will enjoy bread (even if not perfectly risen this first time) that is better than anything you probably ever have bought in a normal grocery store.
That is it. Aside from baking it, the whole process of making the dough and the slight manipulation after the first rise, and putting into a loaf pan will take something like 10 or 15 minutes total. And that includes getting everything out and putting it away again.
Variations? There are quite a few possible things to try. But don’t try to do too much at once. I varied this just one variable each time so I could see what worked best and what didn’t make any difference at all. My third loaf was already near perfect.
Now I have talked about how I let nature do all the work, but does it make a difference to how the bread tastes, to the mouth feel of the crumb and crust? Damned sure it does. You wont get that until you actually do this and eat your first loaf. It tastes amazing. It is moist and chewy, and it doesn’t just dissolve away in your mouth. I won’t waste much time on superlatives, you just have to see for yourself. The long rise makes for a much better loaf.
Now, on to sourdough. Sometime after you make a couple of loaves, you might want to see what all the fuss about sourdough is. I am not going to describe how to make a starter. There are lots of resources on line and in books for that. But here are a few facts to know that I have wrestled from my own experiences.
My sourdough starter making bubbles after a feeding
One, all the daily work to get a sourdough starter going is a lot like all the work you will be doing in making bread the way I have already described it. If you can’t do what I have done here, then you probably wont be doing what needs to be done to begin and successfully make a sourdough starter. And what you need to make and feed a starter will involve all the same ingredients anyway, save the yeast. So all of this I have set out here is good practice and good routine anyway. And learning what fermented dough looks, smells and works like is part of what making a starter is all about.
Two, what we typically call a sourdough starter is a bit of a misnomer. Starters like this are composed of the wild yeast that is in the air around us and more importantly in the flour (which is why unbleached and organic is better). It is also why bringing home sourdough starter from elsewhere isn’t really very important since your local strains will take over pretty soon anyway.
First time going into the fridge. Rubber band indicates level at prior feeding. Went into fridge after several hours on counter after feeding.
Commercial yeast is just one strain of yeast that predictably has a very energetic growth response to being fed flour at temperatures around room temperature. As all yeast grows they create alcohol, CO2 and some other flavor compounds. These all create bubbles and flavors. The longer you let them ferment the more flavor. Wild yeast creates more variations of flavors, but aren’t usually as energetic under normal household conditions (if they were, then they would eat all the available food and then die). Though over time (like many, many weeks) they may build up some greater potency.
The sour in sourdough is not created by yeast. It is created by a bunch of different bacteria, those that also create vinegar in the right conditions. These also get introduced from the air and in the flour naturally. They take a few days to colonize and grow within a starter. So there is very little or none of that sourness in yeast breads made in just one day. Some bakers make wild starters in conditions where very little sourness occurs and they like it that way. For others, the sourness is their primary signature, like in San Francisco sourdough.
Same starter a day later, after the fridge had put the yeast to sleep and the bubbles dissipated. Level fell back to where it was at the last feeding.
You can even combine sourdough and commercial yeast in one loaf. In fact I am quite sure that other than in artisanal bakeries, any sourdough you buy from a store will have both. There may not be any sourdough starter in there at all. A commercial bakery might make “sourdough” using commercial yeast and some vinegar or other flavoring. Sad, but true. If it was made in an industrial bakery, this is almost certainly the case.
Now is combining sourdough starter and commercial yeast some sort of sin in your own kitchen? Not at all. In your own kitchen you know what is going in there and you do what you like for reasons of your own. In fact, I have started to use a small portion of my sourdough starter in my normal yeast bread simply to have the best of both. I get a little of the wild sourdough taste but the predictability of my very sufficient supply (I planned ahead) of commercial yeast. But i don’t use my sourdough starter as a shortcut, to speed up the whole process. My kitchen; my rules.
I started doing this because I realized after a few true sourdough loaves that I probably would grow tired of the strong sour taste resulting from these strong overactive yeast and bacteria in my hometown kitchen. You can do what you want. Maybe your local yeast and bacteria are less aggressive than my mid-Atlantic strains. After awhile I found for me that adding just a nice spoonful of starter to my yeast dough gave me some added flavor and still a nice predictable rise. Once a week I can feed my starter to replenish it and the rest of the time it simply sits in my fridge.
And what about just using old dough in the new dough and not using a starter at all. Well I have done that too. Especially when making bread every day and using a 24 hour rise time, it is very easy. At the same time of day you deal with the first risen dough and put it into your pan, you then just reserve a little dough, around 80 g. You then put that right into the new dough you are making up then for tomorrow, which will first rise over the next 24 hours. All the work is done at one session in the kitchen; same time each day, half for today’s bread and half for tomorrow’s. No commercial yeast needed. No separate starter needs to be kept.
The only things you need to know about this “old dough” method is that if you aren’t going to make up the new dough right away, then just stick the reserved old dough into the fridge in a closed container. It will keep for a week, maybe a month, maybe more. No fuss.
Second, this reserved dough method will only work long-term when using wild yeast as the starting point. So you need to begin a sourdough starter for this. You can do this reserved dough method only for about three times after starting with commercial yeast before it fails.
My first bread made entirely with sourdough starter and no commercial yeast. The starter was about 8 days old at this point. It needed a few more weeks to fully mature in potency. This loaf was a little dense. But the flavors were huge and the texture supper moist. This loaf also lasted longer before becoming stale, a common trait for sourdough. I probably could have baked this a few more minutes to harden up the crust. This loaf was made in a slightly larger pan.
This is something you will not find written anywhere else. I did this, started with commercial yeast and reserved dough each time. My fourth generation bread made with old reserved dough (started with commercial yeast) did not rise much. I was perplexed until I found out that commercial yeast would die in acidic mediums. As my daily reserved dough got older, going through new generations each day, it got sour. I started to notice this taste in loaf number three. I was excited about it. But by loaf number 4, it was sour enough to inhibit or kill the commercial yeast. As I later pieced together. This wont happen once you have a wild sourdough starter to use at first. Wild yeast strains have evolved to live side by side with the bacteria that make vinegar. They had to or they would be extinct.
So that is it. I also have made up loaves outside the loaf pan. These work too and are a lot of fun. But when the goal is mainly to have a fantastic slice or two of bread for a sandwich or toast during our lock downs, what is set out here will give you a great start. You will be enjoying bread from day one. And maybe, just maybe, you will decide that the amount of work here is less than going to the store to buy an inferior product. And maybe all of us making our own better bread while we are self-isolated, maybe that will convince our stores and bakers to do better. They will have to do a lot better to match what you very simply can do for yourself.
Enjoy, and let me know how it turns out.
My first boule. But used the same recipe. Made 150% of my normal loaf proportions. Probably could have baked this a couple of minutes more, but the crust was still crisp and had great flavor.
Notes on equipment: You don’t need much more than a bowl, a spatula and a baking pan. But there are couple of extra items that I am finding pretty useful.
A digital kitchen scale. I have been using a scale rather than measuring things and am finding it actually is a lot easier. There is a good reason why you might want to use one, other than convenience. Flour changes volume and density easily. One day I measured out a cup of flour from a bin and it was about 145g. The next day another cup flour out of that same bin was about 200g. That is a huge variation. Probably mostly due to compaction, but also perhaps due to moisture content and relative humidity. By using weights you cancel out a lot of this daily variation. Second, it really is easier. You don’t fuss with a measuring cup, you just start adding spoonfuls of whatever until the weight is reached. Finally, a lot of things in baking go by ratios which are set by weights, not volumes. For instance when you make a sourdough starter, the ratio of water to flour in ongoing feeding is equal parts of old starter, four and water. They aren’t equal by volume. So feeding is very easy with the container sitting on the scales.
A cheap plastic dough scraper. This was an early investment and it is really handy to use. Instead of manhandling wet dough around, I just scrape it back and forth.
a loaf wrapped in waxed wrap
Properly sized baking loaf tins. As I discuss above, I have a really small Pullman pan. it is a cube 4 inches across and high. That makes up the perfect amount of bread for one person. A pullman pan also has a lid, you don’t need to use that, but I find that it actually makes the outcome more dependable and I’ve grown fond of the little square slices of bread. You don’t need a lid, and you can make bread in larger pans. You can in fact make great bread like my boule in a Dutch Oven with just a little extra technique.
Waxed wraps. These are wonderful reusable wraps made from beeswax and cloth. no plastic. My Goddaughter gave me some for Christmas. They keep the bread fresh and no trash needs to be thrown away.
Copyright 2020 D Abbott