David S. Cargo's Class Notes for Bread Like No Other
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What Is Bread?
We probably take bread for granted. We don’t think about it much.
The Basic Ingredients
You can make bread with the four basic ingredients.
- Flour
- Water
- Yeast
- Salt
The Basic Process
- The ingredients are mixed.
- The mixture is kneaded, to produce dough.
- The dough is allowed to rise.
- The risen dough is punched down.
- The degassed dough is formed into shapes (often loaves).
- The formed dough is allowed a second rise.
- The formed dough is baked in a hot oven, where it becomes bread.
- The bread is cooled on a rack.
The Variations on the Details
This is where different recipes take off from the basics, and where you can do most of your improvisation.
Variations on Ingredients
There are great opportunities for variation on basic ingredients.
Flour
This is one of the obvious things to change. You can use different kinds of wheat flour. Each change produces a slightly different result.
- Using all-purpose flour instead of bread flour makes for a less-strong dough.
- You can use semolina (which is a different grind of wheat flour).
- You can use whole wheat flour.
Beyond just using wheat flour, you can use other kinds of flour as well.
- Rye flour (in many different grinds).
- Oat flour
- Soy flour
- Corn flour
- Rice flour
- Wild rice flour
- Potato flour (or potato flakes)
Each of these will give a different taste and texture to the result.
Most of these flours lack gluten, which is a protein that gives bread its characteristic strength. With less gluten, breads will not rise as much and will not be as structurally strong.
Why would you want something that resulted in a softer product?
Well, buns and items like cinnamon rolls should not be tough. You might want bread that stands up well when spreading cold peanut butter, but that might be too tough for something else.
Water
For the most part, water is water, but what bread needs is moisture.
That means that almost any liquid or moist ingredient will work.
Here are some substitions that can be made for part or all of the water in bread.
- Milk, cream, or half-and-half
- Sour cream
- Yogurt
- Cottage cheese
- Wine
- Fruit juice
- Eggs
- Oils
- Butter
- Mayonnaise
The substitutions that add fat will make for a richer dough.
There is also the issue of how much moist ingredients to use.
Many recipes have a ratio of 1 water to 3 flour (known as a 33 percent hydration level). Some recipes go has high as 1 water to 2 flour (a 50 percent hydration lavel) or even slightly higher.
Wet doughs are harder to work with, but they result in breads with a very open texture.
Yeast
There are fewer variations you can do with yeast, but there are still some worth noting.
- Sourdough starter (can take longer, but adds flavor)
- Preferments (made ahead of time, but again add flavor)
- Instant yeast (theorically allows you to skip the step of proofing the yeast)
- Rapid rise yeast (theoritically makes bread rise faster)
There is a trade-off between how much yeast and how much time bread takes.
There is also a trade-off between how much time bread takes and how much flavor it has.
Long ferments provide flavor than short ones.
Salt
There a few variations in salt that you can do with bread. For the most part, salt is salt.
Salt servers to moderate the growth of yeast, add flavor to bread, and to help the bread retain moisture, making it last longer.
- How much salt
- When to add the salt
- What kind of salt
Bread without salt tastes flat and goes stale quickly. Some breads don’t use it though (such as Tuscan Bread).
Most different kinds of salt will taste the same in bread. There may be some differences in taste if you put the salt on the outside of bread.
You can use an egg wash to make the salt stick to the formed dough.
Additional Ingredients
Sometimes you want to change the nature of bread by adding rather than substituting.
This can be tricky because what you add to the dough can change how the dough behaves as well as how the bread tastes.
Most of the additions will change the flavor of the bread and some will change the texture.
One ingredient to consider adding is vital wheat gluten. This is most useful if you need more gluten to compensate for using all-purpose flour instead of bread flour, when using nonwheat flour, or when adding a lot of extra ingredients that require the dough to hold together better.
Other ingredients that can be added are cheese, olives, sauted onions, diced jalapenos (jalapeno bread sticks).
Variations on Process
Each step in the procss can be subject of its own variations; the results will be a bit different in each case, but there are good reasons for that.
Mixing
The main variations on mixing would be in when you mix ingredients together or whether you are mixing by hand or with a machine.
When You Mix
You can make a preferent using half the normal amount of yeast, 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of your liquid (water typically) to form a preferment.
You can let this sit at room temperature for several hours up to 3 days. (You should stir it twice a day if you are doing it for a long interval.)
How you mix
When mixing by hand, keep in mind that you should always stir around the bowl in the same direction. (That promotes the formation of gluten.) The goal of mixing is to get the flour, water, yeast, and salt into an initial combination.
This is sometimes referred to as “a shaggy mess.”
If you are using a heavy-duty mixer (like a KitchenAid or a Viking mixer), it already is restricted to going in one direction. You just need to add enough flour to get the mixture to “clean the bowl.”
Kneading
When kneading by hand, there might be some variations depending on whether you have a wet dough or not.
A wet dough has to be handled differently. Sometimes you wind up doing some pretty dramatic slapping down of the dough.
You can also use a stretch and fold technique that trades some time for some kneading. (Here’s another link with a video.)
How do you know when you are done kneading?
The trick with kneading is “How do you know when you are done?”
For this we use the windowpane test (also known as the membrane test).
You can also embark on the adventures of making no-knead bread. That’s a more complicated subject than I can deal with here.
First Rise
There are two questions for the first rise. First, is it necessary? Second, should it be slow or fast?
How many rises should a dough have is not really a simple one. Some lean doughs will have enough energy that they can rise up to five times. (Each rise takes less time.)
The trade-off is that the more rises, the longer it takes but with more flavor and the less structural integrity.
- If the flavor from your bread comes from extra ingredients (say, jalapenos and onions or cinnamon and sugar), then I would even skip the first rise.
- If the flavor from your bread comes from the fermentation process, then the slower the rises or the more rises the more flavor you get.
Letting dough rise overnight in a refrigerator is good for flavor.
Peter Reinhart’s first book was about slow rises: Brother Juniper’s Bread Book: Slow-rise As Method And Metaphor
How do you know when the dough is done rising?
The key here is that the dough inflates as it rises. Dough that is done rising is no longer springy. If you stick your finger into the dough, the indentation will stay there. If it bounces back, it is not done rising yet.
Punching Down
There is not much variation here, but there is some.
A few recipes actually want to to avoid degassing the dough; others just say to literally punch the dough to degas it. Violently degassing the dough disrupts the gluten, weakening the dough.
In some cases you need the dough to be very pliable (like when it gets rolled out). In that case, not only do you degas the dough, but you let it rest and even “shock” the dough by picking it up and slamming it onto the work surface.
If you skipped the first rise, then you obviously don’t have to punch down the dough either.
Forming
This is where a lot of the variation of bread comes in. This is where you determine the size of each piece. This is where you decide the shape.
This is where you do your bread sculptures.
This is where you make your rolls, buns, bread sticks, pan loaves or free-form loaves.
There are lots of tricks when making filled breads.
Second Rise
Again the main question is whether to do warm and fast, or cool and slow.
One of the winners in the bake-offs was John Perhay’s Overnight Cinnamon Rolls.
Usually you will just let things rise in a warm spot.
How do you know when the dough is done rising?
If you press your finger into the dough (somewhere that it won’t show), the indentation will stay there. If it bounces back, it is not done rising yet.
Baking
I’m going to start with the obvious question, then go into more detail, because this part does not change.
How do you know when the bread is done baking?
There are two main ways of telling if the bread is done baking.
You can take it out of the oven and thump it on the bottom; if it sounds hollow, then it is done.
Or, if you have a direct read thermometer, you can stick it into the loaf (from the side about in the middle), and read the temperature.
For lean breads, the interior temperature can be 200 degrees.
For rich breads, the interior temperature can be 190 degrees.
(For cake, the interior temperature is 180 degrees.)
If bread is not done baking, and you take it out of the oven, it will fall, much like a cake falls.
The interior, especially near the bottom, will be compacted and maybe gummy.
When you cut a loaf in half, look at the bottom in the middle to see how well it was baked.
The Purpose of Baking
The purpose of baking is to turn dough into bread. Most times you want the bread crust to turn an appropriate color.
The key things about baking are what kind of bread, the size of the piece, what kind of loaf pans, and what kind of oven.
What Kind of Bread
Lean breads can bake at a higher temperature than rich breads. A normal loaf of bread (a 1.5 lb. loaf) would bake in a pan at about 400 degrees.
A rich bread would bake at about 375 degrees.
What Size of Loaf
You can actually bake small pieces of bread at 500 or 600 degrees (if you watch them carefully).
Large loaves should bake longer at lower temperatures.
What Kind of Pans
If you bake in glass pans, you should bake at a lower temperature, about 25 degrees cooler than otherwise.
If you bake in dark metal pans, do the same.
If you bake in shiny metal pans, make no adjustment.
What kind of Oven
If you are lucky enough to bake in a brick or clay oven, you will find that bread bakes faster there. It’s because heat comes from three sources, not one. A retained heat oven provides heat by radiation, conduction, and convection.
A home oven (one without a hot baking stone or ceramic insert), provides heat only by convenction (hot air).
Therefore, baking times in retained heat ovens are shorter, potentially much shorter.
Cooling
The cooling of loaves should not vary much. The key thing is that loaves should be cooled out of the pans (if they were in pans) on a wire rack so that air can circulate beneath them.
Otherwise the bread will get soggy as it cools.
Bread is still cooking when it comes out of the oven, and may continue cooking for another half hour.
That’s why you should not slice bread straight from the oven; it can’t be done yet.