Making Good Bread

Good bread is hard to find especially in the center of Indiana. Good bread is not terribly hard to find in Michigan where I was raised and where I routinely visit however. In south central Michigan great bakeries can be found. In Howell you can find Oh Crumbs! Bakery. Oh Crumbs! is great bread with a German twist. When in Ann Arbor I visit Zingermans. Zingermans is almost always great but it is a little expensive. When in Ypsilanti I visit Bird Dog Baking. Bird Dog makes super tasty bread often made with interesting seeds, nuts and flowers.

If, however, you are in a bread desert, like me, and you don’t necessarily want to eat Bunny Bread it might make sense to bake your own. I started making bread with both beer yeast and my own starter, with some seriousness, about ten years ago. Nothing beats fresh rye bread out of the oven. The recipe is based on the Jim Lahay no-knead bread recipe.¹ Here, my instructions for making bread are more idiosyncratic than ideal. These steps, however, lead to a pretty good bread.

A loaf of bread from this recipe will take between 12 and 20 hours. Time involved includes:
1. mixing and preparing for rise. (25 minutes).
2. Letting the bread rise (between 10 and 18 hours)
3. Stretching and Letting the Bread Rise (5 minutes stretching, 2-3 hours rise).
4. Forming (15 – 20 minutes (including 15 minutes time to let the shaped dough to sit).
5. baking (about 35 minutes).

Normally, I start in the evening about 5 pm. Then, I mix all ingredients and then place them in a covered bowl over night. At nine, the next morning, I gently stretch the mixture and replace into the bowl. At about three pm I remove the mixture, shape and bake.

Ingredients:
1. Flour(s)
Four cups or about 1.5 lbs of flour(s).

The mixture of flours can include: bread flour, whole wheat, or other flowers that you desire. If you want to make the bread with different flours you should still use no less than one cup (4.3 oz) of white bread flour to total of 4 cups (1.5 lb). To make bread I have used, rye flour, whole wheat, and Kalmut.

2. Salt, 1 – 3 teaspoons, depending on taste.

3. Additives, About four tablespoons or 8oz (weight).
Spices and or nuts: I use sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or walnuts. For spice I use caraway seeds sometimes anise. Use what you feel comfortable using. Recently I have been using diastatic malt powder. This powder, made from barley and I seem to get a better texture and flavor by adding about ½ teaspoon per cup of flower.

4. Yeast
½ to 3/4 teaspoon of, active dry, beer yeast. Add yeast to one ounce of warm water.

5. Water
1 1/8 to 1 ½ Cup of water. No more than 2.

6. Toping. One egg white or olive oil.

Beer yeast and sourdough bread are made with the same basic steps but making the starter-yeast as well as folding it into the bread dough is only slightly complicated than beer yeast bread.
For me, the process of making bread begins in the evening, between 5 and 7pm and ends with a baked loaf about 6pm the next day. Waiting for the dough to rise is the most time consuming part of the process. Mixing, working with the dough and baking amounts to a little less than an hour.

1. Mixing and Preparing for Rise

You will need:
1. Large mixing bowl,
2. A small bowl (for additives)
3. Measuring cup and or kitchen scale.
4. Small cup for yeast and water mixture
5. Wooden spoon
6. Measuring spoons.

Prepare yeast, salt and additives. Pour yeast into warm water, mix and set aside. Put the measured salt in to a small bowl and add spices or nuts to the bread pour them also into the small bowl and set aside.

Measure flour into the mixing bowl. Add the water. Mix the flour with a nice strong wooden spoon at first, then mix with your hands. Never mix like you are chopping, mix instead in a tight determined and aware circle in a looping pattern so to encourage the development of long strands of gluten. It is important not to spend too much time mixing the flour. Stop mixing when all the flour is saturated with water. Pack into a nice round ball and let sit between 20 minutes and an hour. This saturates the dough and lets the gluten strands streak. This is called letting the dough autolyse.² Return to the dough and mix in the soaked yeast as well as the additives that you left aside in the small bowl (salt and discretionary herbs, spices or nuts etc). Mix, as above, until thoroughly mixed.

2. Letting The Bread Rise
Let the dough rise 12 – 20 hours. Cover the dough with a wet cloth. The wet cloth reduces the chance that the surface of the dough will dry out.

3. Stretching and Letting the Bread Rise.

In the morning, about 9 AM. Take the risen dough with your hands, shape into a ball and stretch the dough as far as you can without breaking it. Never break the gluten strands. Stretch and roll back into a ball several, maybe ten times. Try to stretch the dough in in the same direction every time. After the dough has been stretched return it to the mixing bowl, replace the cover and return to it around 3pm. If you don’t stretch the dough you are likely to have bread that lacks that lacks a ‘chewy’ texture and crumbles.

4. Forming

Sprinkle a bit of flower on the table that you will be using to shape the bread. If you want to make a boule, a round loaf of bread, flatten your dough to about 1” in height making sure that there are no air bubbles in the dough (Figs 1 and 2). Now fold in the four corners of the round dough and then the remaining dough of the circle to meet at the center (Figs 3 and 4). Pinch the dough at the center, again, making sure there are no air bubbles. Turn the ball upside down and drag the folded and pinched hemisphere of the dough against your working surface making sure to close, compress and shape the dough into a nice even ball (Figs 5 and 6). Preheat the oven to 450º F.

Let sit for about 15 or 20 minutes and repeat the process. Now place the shaped dough into your proofing basket. Let rise for about an hour. The process is likewise for a rectangular loaf or oblong flat bread; press out the dough in to a rectangle, fold long sides at the middle and the short sides to a point similar to the distance that the long sides had to be folded to the middle etc.

5. Baking
Normally baking bread takes about 35 to 40 minutes. I would have already preheated the oven to 450º F. The key to a good crust is a steamy oven or bake the bread in a Dutch oven. When baking bread without the use of a Dutch oven I place a pan of water on the bottom shelf of the oven as I preheat the oven in order to steam up the oven.

Score the bread. When the shaped and proofed dough is set on the pan, just prior to baking, the loaf needs to be scored. To score the bread I use a small, wet serrated knife. Professionals use a razor blade with a special handle called a lame. My serrated knife does just fine. I score the bread either in “diamonds” or an acute angle to the bread about an inch apart. It is good practice to score the bread because the score encourages the bread to split at the scores not some arbitrary region at the surface.

While a steamy oven makes a good loaf of bread, the best bread is baked in a ceramic crock with a cover or a Dutch oven. The crock distributes the heat evenly and keeps the steaming moisture rising from the dough concealed within the crock making a nice thick crust.

In either case, if you cook the bread open in an oven or a crock, you will have to watch the bread. The common rule of thumb is that when the internal temperature of the bread reaches 190º F the bread is done. I’ve only measured the internal temperature of bread once. Normally bread can withstand a little bit of over-baking if it comes to that, however, I find that once a normal loaf of bread is in the oven just over 35 minutes and or reaches that ‘golden brown’ you can pull it out.

Once the bread is out of the oven it is best to let the bread sit for a while so that it’s crust develops. Then, like a ceramic pot that ‘pings’ as cools, having just left the kiln; your bread will emit cracking sounds as it cools in the air. Bonne confection du pain! Bonne appétit, Добър апетит!

1. Two valuable references included a website called The Fresh Loaf (https://www.thefreshloaf.com), an online forum for bread makers as well as, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the re-popularizer of no-knead bread: https://bittmanproject.com/recipe/no-knead-bread/ and https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread. Jim Lahey and Mark Bittman promoted no-knead bread. Jim Lahey’s Shop: https://www.sullivanstreetbakery.com/about/.
2. A good explination of letting the dough autolyse can be found here: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/guides/how-to-autolyse/.