Sunday 20 May 2007

Bread

Penny came for a BBQ lunch yesterday, and she asked how I bake bread. Most people that have tried it want to know, as it generally tasted like real bread, rather than the white paste that we typically buy at the supermarket.

The usual conclusion that people make is that we have a bread maker squirelled away in the kitchen somewhere, but in reality, all we have is a mixer and an oven.

The recipe that I use most of the time is one that I got from my Mum, and she got it from my brother, and he clipped it from the Financial Times. It's very basic. Purists will stick their noses up at it and state that "it is not real bread". Whatever.

I don't make huge loaves, since I prefer to eat fresh bread every day. That means making something that is about half the size or less of your average supermarket paste loaf. Anything more is a waste, unless you want to slice it and freeze it (which is great for making toast the following morning).

If I want to make "real bread", as in something like the French make, then I turn to my book Dough, which has some marvelous recipes in it. If I ever get back to the UK, I'll have to go to the Bertinet Kitchen in Bath and do some lessons.

The Dough book is excellent, partly because it comes with a DVD that has a short movie on it explaining how to knead dough and what the consistency should look like. My dough never looks like that in the DVD, so don't expect baguettes if you come for lunch.

Here's what I do.

I throw some yeast and sugar into the mixing bowl, along with some warm water. I give that a stir and then leave it to sit until it bubbles a bit. Bertinent poo-poo's this approach, saying one should rub "proper" yeast in the flour by hand, and never use sugar to help it rise. I've done that, and the bread still rises, but you end up with much smaller bubbles in the bread. I like my bread to have big bubbles in it - that's just my preference. If you want small bubbles, leave out the sugar and knead it after the first rising. Sometimes of course I end up with massive bubbles in the bread - bubbles that are more like caves. That would never do in a commercial bakery, but I don't give a bugger about them.

Note that I don't measure the amount of water either. Bertinet is most particular about weighing everything, and you need a set of digital scales to do it properly. I am too cheap to spend $80 on some digital scales, and besides, I went into the kitchen the other day and found a 15kg monkey sitting on my scales, which only go up to 3kg, so I get the feeling that mine are no longer that accurate, given that the spring has probably been stretched well beyond its design limits.

After the water and yeast has bubbled a bit, I throw in some olive oil (I use the Jamie Oliver method and just splash in a dollop). I guess you are supposed to add one table spoon. I can't be bothered with the extra washing up, so I just dollop it in.

I then toss in 2.5 to 3 cups of flour. I use a 50/50 mix of wholemeal and white flour. I find that makes a bread with a nice mouthfeel. If you go too hippy and add more wholemeal, or even make it 100% wholemeal, then you end up with a loaf that feels more like a granite kitchen top than bread. 100% white flour on the other hand makes a great loaf, but I feel that my innards need something to help push the poo through, so I go for 50% "metamucil".

I use a mixer with a dough hook to do the mixing, but for 20 years, Mum did it with a big plastic bowl and a wooden spoon. Because this mix is quite sloppy, you can easily mix it with a spoon. I am lazy, and I make a drier mix than Mum most of the time, so you need the mixer and hook to work it. Either that, or you need forearms like hams to do it by hand.

Once in the mixer, I chuck in just enough water to make it goopy. This is always a matter of trial and error. I have tried weighing the water etc, and it's made a good loaf, but the difference in quality at the end between a loaf where I have weighed everything and one where I have just chucked it together is not that great.

After all, how did bakers make bread before the invention of accurate scales? I presume they just chucked it together and did it by feel, adding more water or flour as required to get the right mix.

I made this mix quite goopy and wet - it is almost like the flour and water paste that we used as glue as kids. If I was doing it the Bertinet way, it would be much drier - it would even stick to the sides of the bowl.

I have this great plasticy mould thing that I use as my bread tin. I smear a bit of flour around the inside to help stop the dough from sticking, although it doesn't help much when the dough is this wet. If I make a fairly dry dough, the dusting of flour helps a lot.

At this point, I normally sprinkle sesame seeds on the top, or a bit of salt. Mum pours a bit of olive oil on hers. I have tried that too.

It's now time to put it somewhere warm and let it rise for an hour. As it is getting colder at the moment, I heat the oven up slightly, then turn it off and stick the bread in there for an hour. I have learnt to put it on a tray, because if it rises too far and boils over the edge, the tray will catch the drippings. It beats having bits of burnt dough stuck to the bottom of the oven.

Normally, at the end of the hour, you'd take the dough out and knead it slightly. The Dough book is well worth buying simply to watch the DVD and get Bertinet's thoughts on "knocking back" the dough, which is the last thing that you want to do with it. Bertinet folds it gently in order to fold more air into the dough, which is why baguettes are so light and fluffy on the inside. If you knock all the air out of it, you end up with a slab of concrete.

I don't bother. I just turn the temperature of the oven up and let the bread cook.

I have tried many ovens and many temperatures, and surprisingly, bread is very resilient. You can cook it at many different temperatures and for different lengths of time and still get something quite edible out of the oven. I have baked it at 180 for an hour, and at 250 for 20 minutes, and the only difference is generally in the crust.

The trick I learnt from Dough is to spray water into a really hot oven. The steam forms a really crusty crust. Again that is why baguettes have a beatiful, light fluffy crust. The French use steam ovens. The only way to replicate a steam oven at home is to get a squirty bottle and squirt a water spray onto the sides or floor of the oven.

If you don't cook your eyeballs in the process, it works pretty well.

Another thing that I do is take the bread out of the tin once the top has browned and plonk the bread down on the tray. That helps the bottom and sides to brown. If you leave it in the tin, the top will be nice and crisp, but the sides might be a bit pale and not so crusty.

Bertinet is very big on cooking bread at 250 degrees. That's like making pizza. The thing is though, he is making small, thin loaves generally, whilst I am making a short, fat loaf. If you put a fat loaf into a hot oven for a short time, the outside will be nice and crisp, but the inside might still be uncooked. One trick is to start it really hot to crisp up the outside, then turn it down so that it cooks all the way through.

When is it cooked? I judge it by the colour of the crust. When it looks nice, I reckon it is cooked. Sometimes, I have pulled it out to early, and the inside has still been a bit underdone. It's fine after being toasted, but you can't use it for sandwiches. At other times, it has gone a bit long and been almost stale to taste.

But hey, it's bread. If you bugger it up, you just make another loaf.

I buy 10kg bags of flour at the markets for $8, and I use about 300 - 400gms of flour per loaf. Looked at that way, I am using about 30 cents of flour per loaf. It's not a big problem to simply tip a dud loaf into the bin and try again.

Compared to what we are paying for white paste at the supermarket, I can afford to stuff up 8 loaves in a row and still be in front.

Here are a few links to the Chorleywood process. I have another good book on food that describes it in great detail, but these short descriptions will have to do.

BBC food page.

Bread matters. Read the very last paragraph at the bottom of the page. Ugh.

Technology in Australia. After reading this page, I discovered why so much Amercian bread is inedible - they use a different production process.

Food processing technology. The interesting thing that I discovered from this link was how some big bakeries put the dough into a semi-vacuum in order to speed the formation of bubbles within the dough.

Duh!

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