Basic Bread

Making bread is hard; making bread is easy. A lot of that is because making bread requires both exact attention to detail, and experience to recognise the condition of your dough. All of which means that you are going to fail a lot: at first. So as to minimise this, I’m going to try to describe a basic bread recipe that should work, with minimal opportunity to fail.

Bread starts with flour, water, salt and yeast. The other main factors are time and temperature. Did you notice that I didn’t mention kneading?

There is one core recipe for bread:

• bread flour (high protein wheat flour)
• salt: 2% by weight of the flour
• water: 60 - 70% by weight of the flour (sometimes more), at 25 - 30C
• yeast: fresh or dried, the exact quantity isn’t very important

If you remember that, you will have the basis of making good bread every time.

Let’s put this into practice:

• 450g bread flour
• 9g salt (about 1 tsp?)
• 7g dried yeast (one sachet)
• 300g water, at 25C (66%)

Quick Method

Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl. Develop the dough by lifting, stretching and folding the dough until it becomes smoother and less sticky; about ten minutes.

Cover and leave until doubled in size, 60 - 90 minutes.

Shape into a ball with a smooth upper surface. Either leave as a ball, which may flatten in baking, or put into a loaf tin. Leave to proof for about 45 minutes, or until the surface only just barely refills after a gentle touch with the pad of a finger.

Set your oven to 250C. When up to temperature put in the oven for about 40 minutes, until the surface has a light chestnut colour.

Allow to cool for at least an hour before cutting.

Full Method

Start with very clean hands, or your dough will be grey!

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients together. You can use your hands, but at this stage the dough will be very sticky. I prefer to use a plastic scraper with a curved edge. After about two minutes, the dough should be well mixed, but just as sticky as when you started.

The next stage is to “develop the gluten”; which means working the dough so that the strands of protein that are jumbled about in the wet flour unravel, and start to align with each other. There are several ways to do this, but the simplest and most direct is this: turn the dough out onto a very clean and dry surface. With clean hands and just the tips of your fingers, gently lift up the mass of the dough; stretch it up until the end of the mass is just still sticking to the surface. Fold it over itself, then turn your hands so that you pick it up again by the other two sides from before, and repeat. Keep on going. This will probably take ten minutes at first, but within a few repetitions (i.e. a loaf a day for a week or two), it should only take a couple of minutes. As you repeat these stretches, the visible surface of the dough will become smoother, more stretchy, and less sticky. Of course, it will still stick to the dough on your hands.

At this point you should have a much better looking ball of dough. Lightly flour the dough, and the inside of your bowl, and put the dough back in the bowl. Cover and leave for a “bulk rise”. The normal instruction is to wait until it has doubled in size, but this is rather hard to visually estimate. But just leave it for 1 to 2 hours, depending on temperature.

Next step. lightly dust your work surface, the top of the dough, and your hands. Turn out the dough, with the top side down on the floured work surface. It shouldn’t stick. Now, grasp each of the four corners in turn, stretch it out, and fold it to the centre and lightly press down. Repeat once or twice more, giving a small turn each time. Flip the dough over so that the smooth surface is on top, and use a cupping motion on the lower edges of the dough to tighten the surface a little more, and make a better seal of the edges that you were pressing together.

Put this somewhere for a final proof. Simplest is to put it smooth surface up in a loaf tin, but on a floured baking tray (smooth side up), or in a well floured banneton are common alternatives (it doesn’t actually matter if you put the loaf in the banneton seam or smooth side down, if just depends on how you prefer the look of the cracks that forms on the upper surface after baking). If you don’t have a banneton, work a large handful of flour (or rice flour, cornmeal, etc) into a clean dry tea towel and place it into your mixing bowl. Cover (with another tea towel, or a cheap disposable shower cap) so that the cover won’t stick to the dough, and leave to proof.

You can test for when the bread is ready to bake with the finger tip test. With a clean, dry finger tip, lightly press on the surface of the dough; you should make an indent of just a few mm. Now watch the dent for a few seconds. If it springs back almost immediately, the dough isn’t fully proofed yet. If the dent remains after several seconds, the dough is over proofed. There is a theoretically ideal state where the dent just barely springs back, but there’s no point in waiting for that; bake while the dough still fully springs back after a few seconds, and you’ll have a good loaf. This may be only 45 minutes, or could be much longer.

At this point, you should have your oven up to temperature (250C); with my oven, this takes 15 minutes. The simplest way of baking to get a good crust is to use a cast iron casserole with lid, although a large ceramic casserole will also give ideal results. Make sure to put your casserole in the oven as soon as you set the temperature, so that both the oven and casserole will be ready together.

Place the loaf onto a sheet of baking parchment, and make a cut approximately 1 cm deep to allow for expansion in the oven. Put the loaf (on the baking parchment) into the casserole, and the casserole in the oven. Bake for 20 minutes, then take the lid off the casserole, and bake for the remaining 15-20 minutes. Take out and leave to cool for at least one hour before cutting; the crumb of your loaf changes considerably as it cools.

Variables

Wetter dough makes nicer bread, but it also tends to spread out if you don’t have it in a strict container like a loaf tin, so you need a drier dough or better dough structure for a free-form loaf. The exact amount of water required is dependent on the flour you are using, and you can only really test it by feel based on experience.

I didn’t say much about yeast. This is because you can use a sourdough starter, a small amount of yeast with a longer fermentation time, or a lot more yeast with a shorter time - the longer the rise the better the end product will taste. In the above recipe, if you were to use 2g dried yeast, I’d allow 2-3 hours for the initial fermentation.

You can dust your proofed loaf with flour, cornmeal, sesame seeds, or brush it with milk or egg wash before cutting if you wish. For the best crust, if you aren’t using the casserole method, put a cup of water in a baking tray on the floor of the oven as you insert your loaf, and for the last five minutes leave the oven door ajar to allow the steam to escape while the crust sets.

Experiment with other mixes of flours: wholemeal will take up less water, as will other lower protein flours; I like to replace some of the plain flour with dark rye flour, at around 5 - 10% of the total.

If you want to try for a slightly larger loaf, use these quantities:

• 600g bread flour
• 12g salt
• 2 - 7g dried yeast
• 360 - 420g (60 - 70%) water at 25C

I have ignored sourdough, old dough, poolish, autolysis, steam ovens…

Temperature

The times given above assume that your kitchen is 20 - 25C. Being cooler isn’t necessarily a problem, you just need to allow longer for rising. At an extreme, the final proofing stage can take place overnight in the fridge, putting the bread in the oven as soon as it comes up to temperature next morning.

Other breads

For flat bread, divide the dough into 4-6 equal portions. Stretch each one out to about 8" long (20-25cm), and put directly on the top shelf of the oven for about six to eight minutes. The bread will puff up into a sphere.

For pizza, divide as for flat bread, but stretch out more; this will need some time resting and restretching, as the dough will pull itself back as it rests. Let the dough sit on a baking sheet for ten minutes. Then top with 2-3 tomatoes (from a tin, without their juice), pulled apart by hand to make a rough coverage over the top of the dough. Top this with a few slices of mozzarella and a couple of basil leaves, and bake for roughly ten minutes.

Rolls? Rolls are good, I’d better do a test run so that I can write down the details.