How to Bake Bread

Everyone can bake bread. Aside from the time for rising, baking bread doesn’t take much longer than going to the bakery or supermarket.

Read a bread recipe. They are all basically the same. In fact, you can even make the same dough taste entirely different by varying the baking and shaping methods.

All breads contain the same basic ingredients. The major ingredient is flour. Depending on the type, flour contains more or less gluten. The gluten is the rubbery substance in the flour which forms the network of tunnels to trap the gases and allow the bread to rise.

Wheat flour contains the most gluten. Of the wheat flours, hard wheat, or bread flour, is the highest in gluten. Cake flour has the lowest gluten content, and all purpose flour is somewhere in between.

I bake all my yeast breads with the bread flour that I used to buy in hundred pound sacks from the bakery supplier. Then it became available in 5 pound bags but not everywhere. I remember having to convince my local Korean grocer in Manhattan to stock it for me. After many visits and a lot of pleading, he finally smiled at me and showed me the bread flour. Now 20 plus years later you can find it along with the other flours, both ordinary and exotic, in the supermarket.

Whole wheat flour does not rise as high and light as white flour, so I prefer to use a mixture of whole wheat and white. Rye flour has very little gluten, so it must be mixed with wheat flour for a light bread.

Along with the flour, the bread will contain yeast, a liquid (milk, eggs, or water), and salt, oil, or butter, and a sweetener. Not all breads contain all these ingredients, but all must have liquid, flour, and yeast.

The yeast is the living plant that feeds on the flour and sugar and emits the gas to enable the bread to rise. I prefer compressed yeast, but dry, active yeast is fine.

The sweetener will be sugar, honey, or molasses. Honey tends to keep

the bread moist longer than the others, so I use it wherever possible.

PROCEDURES
 

The simple steps to baking bread are always the same:

1.  Mix yeast, sweetener, and a little warm water. Be careful. Temperatures over 200 degrees will kill the yeast, so make sure the water isn't too hot.

2.  Add all other ingredients except the flour, and mix well.

3.  Begin adding flour, one cup at a time, while you stir with a wooden spoon or an electric mixer (my Kitchen Aid from the seventies still can do it). If you want to do all the kneading in an electric mixer, you must have a heavy duty machine with a dough hook.

4.  If you choose not to use the electric mixer, dump the entire mixture, when you can no longer stir or mix it, onto a floured surface. Begin to knead and add more flour, a little at a time, until the dough is smooth and no longer sticky. This may take up to 20 minutes. Don't worry--you can't over-knead. Just do not handle the dough so roughly and stretch it so much that you tear the gluten.

5.  When you have a nice, smooth ball of dough, spread some oil on it, and put it in a fairly large plastic bag. (I use the 4 gallon size.) Squeeze the air out of the bag and close it near the top. Put the entire bag in a bowl or basket and let it rise.

6.  Now you must plan the timing. If you’ll return to your bread within a few hours, leave it at room temperature. If you will be much longer, put it in the refrigerator (even overnight). The cooler the temperature, the longer it takes for bread to rise. If you want to speed it up, put it in an unlighted oven with a pan of hot water on the bottom.

7.  When the dough has more than doubled its original size and it doesn’t spring back when you put your finger in it, it has finished rising. Open the bag, punch the dough down, and form the loaves.

8.  To form bread for baking in a loaf pan, roll out the dough with a rolling pin until it is about one inch thick. Cut it into the number of pieces you want, and form one at a time. Roll the dough like a jellyroll, press the ends down, turn them under, and put the roll, seam side down, in a greased pan. (I use a spray.) Make sure the ends touch the pan.

9.  Cover the loaves and let them rise until they reach the top of the pan. Covering is not necessary if you let them rise in an unlighted oven with a pan of hot water on the bottom.

10. Slash the loaves carefully, about 1/4 inch deep, with a razor.

11. Bake in a preheated oven. You will know your bread has finished     baking if it looks brown, smells marvelous, and sounds hollow when you rap it on the bottom with your knuckles.

12.  Cool your breads on a rack, slice, butter, and enjoy.

13.   If you’re not using a loaf pan, follow the instructions in the recipe for forming the loaves. Or, for French or Italian bread: cut the dough into a long rectangle, fold it in half lengthwise, roll and pinch the seams, slash it with a razor, and bake it on a baking pan, seam side down.

14. Challah, the omnipresent shiny braided loaf, is another story. A baker friend taught me how to braid a six strand loaf. It’s simple. Roll out the dough in a large rectangle, slice the rectangle into six strips, but don’t separate them all the way to the top. Divide the strips into two sections (three on a side) and start braiding. Pay attention, this isn’t a task for the multi-tasker. Starting on one side, the top strip goes to the center, then the second strip from the other side goes to the top. Keep repeating top to the center, second to the top, until you have reached the end. Tuck the ends in, brush with egg mixed with vegetable oil, and bake. Even if the braid doesn’t look perfect, the bread will taste perfect.

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ON BAKING BREAD

• White doughs, especially those with eggs and butter, are easiest to handle. Whole wheat will always be a little sticky.
• The smaller the bread, the higher the oven temperature.
• For rye and pumpernickel, rub the hot breads with butter, cover and cool.
• All breads freeze beautifully. Homemade bread, with no preservatives, keeps better in the freezer.
•  Egg beaten with a little oil makes a shiny crust.
•  Dough for free form breads must be a little stiffer so they don’t spread out. Just knead in some extra flour.
•   Bread is alive. It never comes out the same way twice. That’s why it’s so much fun. I can never predict exactly what my bread will look like. (Almost as unpredictable as your children.)
• Challah makes unbelievable French toast. Cut it in wedges, soak it in egg with some milk and vanilla, and fry.
• You will know when you have kneaded long enough by the small blisters that form under the surface of the dough.
• Rising the dough in a plastic bag frees you from the clock. It can’t over-rise and it won’t dry out.
•  If you rise your bread in the refrigerator, bring it to room temperature before you bake it.

 

MORE RECENT THOUGHTS ON BAKING BREAD 
 

I wrote all of the above as a lesson plan for my cooking school—in 1972. Since then, I’ve gone through periods, baking and not baking bread, changing almost as frequently as dieting or not dieting. My children are grown and on their own, but they still talk about their search for a sandwich on Wonder Bread. ( Do they still sell Wonder Bread?) I wonder how they would react today.

The face of nutrition has changed since the seventies. What sounded crazy back then has entered the mainstream. Whole grain breads are almost as popular as the white ones and we do pay attention to what we eat, or we should.

I have to admit to having store-bought breads in my freezer. In fact, I haven’t baked bread lately, but now I can’t wait to experience that unique aroma. I think I’ll start with my favorite seven whole grain cereal bread, the one I made up so many years ago.

But….over the years, technology has made bread baking so much easier. Today I do several things a bit differently.

FOOD PROCESSOR BREAD

     I use my trusty Cuisinart machine for practically everything.  It will handle any bread recipe that calls for up to four or six cups of flour. And it’s so simple: start with the yeast that has been proofed (mixed with some warm water and a little sugar and left until it starts to foam  

• Add a small amount of the dry ingredients so the Cuisinart machine won’t leak.  
• Then add the rest of the ingredients and start adding the flour about a cup at a time. 
• The dough is ready when it forms a ball, no longer sticks to the sides of the container, and spins around on top of the metal blade. 
• Carefully (the blade is sharp) remove the dough and proceed with your recipe. No kneading necessary.

BREAD IN A BREAD MACHINE

The manufacturers will tell you that you can just dump the ingredients in, set it, and forget it. But…the shape of the bread is strange, either cylindrical or like a cube, nothing like the bread I used to bake.

So, I often use the machine to mix, knead, and rise the bread, stopping its progress before it starts to bake. The resulting dough is almost perfect; it doesn’t even suffer from the lack of hand to hand combat and surely doesn’t contribute as much to your messy kitchen.

CONCLUSIONS

Aside from these simple changes, bread is bread. People have been baking bread for thousands of years. If you haven’t tried it, why wait any longer. It’s fun, economical, healthy, and smells so good.

Was There Life Before the Cuisinart?

Is there one piece of equipment that changed my life in the kitchen? If you look at most of my recipes, within the first few lines I mention the food processor or Cuisinart.

In 1973 Zabar’s, the upper West Side Mecca for unusual food, announced that they would be selling the new Cuisinart machine at a discount. My mother, sister, and I met at Zabar’s and joined the other foodies in line on the first day that the Cuisinart was available. We all left with our trophies. I think it cost somewhere around $140, with Zabar’s discount that led to a lawsuit. Zabar’s won.

I remember they said the bowl was made of lexan, a plastic that was formulated for the space program. Plastic? Could it possibly last? It did. I remember breaking the tops off the blades so I could get them in the drawer—now they come that way.

Although I lived on Long Island at the time, I had to shop at Zabar’s because it was the only place I could buy masa harina, the stuff to make tortillas. Now I live in Miami and if I told people that I had to travel to get my masa, they would look at me like I was crazy. There’s a variety of masas available in every store that sells food, and Miami isn’t the only place to buy masa. It’s pretty universal, but I don’t know if there are many crazies out there who actually make homemade tortillas.

In that era, when cooking was a hobby and a passion, I used to make my own ravioli and sausages and had a cooking school in my house. I had to buy semolina in Little Italy and bread flour in hundred pound bags from the bakery supplier. When I lived in New York City and shopped at the local Vietnamese grocery store, I kept asking the grocer to get me bread flour, and he finally did. Now you can get bread flour and semolina in any grocery store.

Over the years I have amassed over 200 cookbooks, but still revert to the original recipes from Joanne’s Kitchen. When I was looking for a recipe for banana bread, I tried about four and finally settled on one that used a quarter pound of butter. Sorry, arteries, I cook with butter. I altered the recipe several times, replaced half of the white flour with whole wheat, and used it as the foundation for the pumpkin bread that is sitting on my counter summoning me to slice and eat. The companion pumpkin dog biscuits have been such a success that Mikey asks me for treats, knowing that I’ll give him a homemade biscuit rather than the store bought stuff he gets from my husband.

Now I have a later model Cuisinart. It’s bigger but very annoying—too safe and complicated. There’s not much I don’t do in the Cuisinart, from cutting vegetables and fruits for my birds to making bread dough. Because the Cuisinart is capable of kneading the dough, you have to be very careful when you add flour for a cake or anything leavened with baking soda or baking powder or you’ll end up with rubber.

My other latest greatest is a vita mix machine, my $400 blender. We still laugh at the day we were taken in by the vita mix man and bought one. It wasn’t a mistake. The prime use for my vita mix is making ice cream. (I hope the “vita” in the name is referring to “life” and not “vitamin.”) The vita mix is so powerful that it can even cook—if you can deal with the racket. No, I don’t prepare soup in my vita mix, but do use it to heat eggs for Caesar dressing and mayonnaise because I don’t like to consume raw eggs. I have to admit, though, that I’ve let it go too long and ended up with scrambled eggs on more than one occasion.

As much as I laugh at the “vita” in vita mix, I do try to use the right ingredients. My pumpkin bread contains whole wheat flour, as do most of the breads I make. When my children were small, they used to have meetings with the neighborhood kids on the front lawn, trying to figure out where they could get their hands on wonder (soft, squishy, white) bread. In school they traded their sandwiches on my 7 wholegrain cereal bread for the wonder kind.

Did they learn about good eating growing up in our house? I wish. My son’s house is stocked with all the junk he couldn’t get at home. I didn’t let them drink juice, just milk or water, because I thought that the fruit sugar was better consumed along with the fiber in the whole fruit. Everyone thought I was crazy, but now the common wisdom is that I was right. I apologize; they all raided the refrigerators in their friend’s houses looking for orange juice.

Now that everyone has moved out and my husband and I have only a Mikey dog and three parrots to feed, I’ve decided to try to forego a lot of packaged and prepared foods and treats in favor of people food. No, I’m not some sort of health food fanatic; I’m not interested in a raw or pure or green or macrobiotic or any other kind of fringe diet. I know I can feed my extended family the same food (with some exceptions) as we eat. As I make up recipes for dog food, I’ll spend the time to figure out the nutrients so no one is deprived and will use the dog treats only as a supplement to my parrots’ seed, nut, and raw fruit and vegetable diet.

So far I’ve made oatmeal dog biscuits and oatmeal cookies and pumpkin dog biscuits and pumpkin bread. It’s really easy and fun. As long as the kitchen is already a mess from the people food and the ingredients are on the counter, the dog food is a breeze. While the pumpkin bread was in the oven, I used the same messy Cuisinart bowl and tools to prepare the dough for the dog biscuits. The pumpkin bread and dog biscuits came out of the oven at the same time and Mikey and the birds were right there for samples.

Best of all, Mikey likes it.