So you want to make your own bread? Hi, I'm Troy McClure. (Gratuitous Simpson's TV reference) I want to share a few thoughts and a lot of words with you on making bread, another in my "Too Many Words About…" series. Read on, if you dare.
It's a good idea to make your own bread. You know exactly what is in it. I think it's kind of therapeutic too, working dough, waiting for it to rise, and getting something hot and fresh out of the oven. Plus your bread will go mouldy after a 4 or 5 days probably. Why is that good? Because unlike the store stuff which stays mould-free for weeks due to lots of preservatives, yours will be healthy and without wacky chemicals.
Here's a recipe for a basic white bread. Once you're comfortable with that, you can start playing with the flour - swapping out part of it for whole-grain or brown flour. If you used ALL brown flour, it can be quite dense. It's do-able but you should read up on it a bit before trying that, so you don't end up with a dense brick.
So - here we go. White bread.
Executive Summary
We're just mixing flour, liquid, yeast (and optionally some salt, sugar and fat) together until it forms a silky yet firm consistency. We let it rise covered until it doubles, punch it down, then form it into loaf pans. It rises once like that, then once again shaped as loaves, then you bake it for half an hour and you're done.
Cheating
You can skip some stuff. You can go directly into the loaf pans and bake it after it rises just once, but it can be less uniform. You can skip the salt, sugar and fat, but the taste will be poorer when you're still learning. So you should follow this fairly closely for your first few tries.
Prepare
Clean a chunk of counter-top well. You'll need the space for kneading the bread. Make sure it's nice and dry.
Ensure you have about 8cups of flour handy. You also need a couple of packages of yeast, some sugar, salt, fat of some kind, and water.
Get two loaf pans, and either grease them inside, or just smear a tsp of veg/olive oil around inside.
The Cooking
Starter: this is waking up the dried yeast. You give it water and something to eat - a bit of sugar.
Dissolve a TBSP of sugar into a cup of warm water in a cereal-sized bowl. Then sprinkle on a package of yeast (I buy bulk yeast, and use 3 tsps). Set it aside while you quickly do the other steps. It's going to foam, so watch it doesn't go over the edges.
Dough:
In a big bowl, measure:
6-cups of white flour
In a big measuring cup, or microwaveable bowl:
2cups of water (or half-water, half-milk)
3TBSP of oil (or butter, or shortening - any fat)
2 tsps of salt
3TBSP of sugar (or you can use honey, molasses, brown sugar)
Stir together and microwave on high for about a minute and a half. Gets it quite hot, not boiling. No microwave? You can use hot water from your kettle instead. We're not trying to cook it, just warm up a) to kill yeasts which might compete with our yeast, and b) create a warm dough in which your yeast will be happy.
Pour the liquid into the flour and stir around until it's absorbed - just a couple of stirs, only about 5 seconds.
Now grab the yeast/water mix which should be foamy (if it's not, your yeast is dead - but that's very rare unless you're using 10yr old yeast). Stir it up and mix that into your dough.
You have now achieved dough. Congrats.
Mix that all up - it quickly becomes a nasty sticky ball, probably. You should probably skip the rest of this paragraph. I fear I'll raise uncertainty if you read this next part… but here goes… If it has used up all the liquid and there is still tons of flour still not wet, you might need to add a bit of water, but just by a few tablespoons But this is a tough judgement that comes from experience, and being able to recognize when it's too dry or not is hard. If there's no dry flour left, it's too wet. If there's over half the dry flour left, it's too dry. Sigh. You might have really 'hard' flour which soaked the water up a lot. It's
probably okay, and you should just proceed. Sorry it's a bit tough to describe the optimal look at this point. Forget I said anything.
Turn it out onto a floured surface. (ie sprinkle some flour down first - about a quarter cup). Now knead!
The Therapeutic Part - Kneading
Knead the dough by using the base of your palm and folding it over repeatedly onto itself. It should start sticky but become smooth quickly. Rub your palms together if they get too gummed up. Work the dry flour bits onto it, and keep flour under the ball too. Once it's all used up, it's probably still tacky and you should be able to work in another half-cup or so of flour. Just keep on kneading, and adding a sprinkle of flour.
If it's too dry, and really solid and hard to knead at the start, just cry and run away (or just work in some extra water, a tablespoon at a time and you can rescue it). It should be malleable like, say, a full water balloon, not sticky and
not hard like cold plasticine. Does that help?
Is it really smooth and sort of bounces back when you poke it? Great. Put a bit of oil on your hands, and rub all over it.
First Rising
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| After kneading, ready to rise |
Now put the dough into a big bowl in which it can double, and cover with first a sheet of plastic wrap, then a damp towel and leave it for 45minutes. Hey, I found a picture of this step. See the ball of dough siting in a bowl.
You can say 'proofing' instead of 'rising' and you'll sound like a seasoned baker.
Give the plastic some slack to expand when the rising happens. See the picture where I lift the towel to show the risen dough. I think this is a different dough ball, 'cuz it's more than you'd get out of that first pic.
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| After the Rising (not the same dough) |
(
Cheat step, you can go straight to loaf pans, just cut it into
two loaves and stick it into pans and let it rise until double and then
put into the oven. But you probably shouldn't).
Into Pans
Assuming you didn't use the cheat step - just punch that risen dough down, then dump it out onto a slightly floured surface, and form it into two 'torpedo' shapes. I could write a page on forming the loaf, but use your imagination for now. Plop each one in an oiled loaf pan, cover with loose plastic and the damp towel and set aside to rise for another 30min.
Also - start your oven up now. Set it for 425ºF.
Oh, you can also slash the top of the dough with a very sharp knife (or box-cutter) if you wish. It can help the top expand without creating weird bubble shapes. But don't worry about it if you don't want to.
Baking
30min later? You can gently pop those pans in the oven, top shelf, and immediately turn the heat back to 325ºF. Set your timer so you don't forget! Your home is about to smell awesome.
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| Cooling after baking - Misc loaf sizes |
Let them get nice and brown. If you thump the bottom it should sound hollow, not dull, if that means anything to you. It will be about 25-35min depending on your oven.
Turn out the loaves, ideally onto a cooling rack, or just onto a board to cool. Don't try to eat right away - wait about 20min for a hot slice, or a couple of hours for a cool slice.
Make extra and freeze 'em in double bags. I make about 4 loaves at a time and freeze them.
Enjoy!
These are some pics from around various south-central areas of Italy, from a trip in the mid-nineties. First in Rome, where we (and everyone else who visits) explored the Colosseum and environs. I was intrigued to see the feral cats running about. I remember thinking that cats living among humans have been a common thing for tens-of-thousands of years, and there is no reason why these cats we were seeing could not be direct descendants of pets in the courts of the Caesars during the height of the Roman Empire.
Off the coast from Napoli, we visited the small Island of Ischia. The notable fortified hilltop fort is a pleasure to see from afar and close up. We wandered it's nooks and crannies, and enjoyed an overnight stay on the little island. Not too far from Capri - but it felt perhaps a bit less heavily touristed (but that's a relative term in this attractive area).
