basic bread making techniques

Bread making can feel a little like a whole different art form to regular cooking.

For those of you new to the baker’s arts. Here’s a list of the main bread making techniques and what you should look out for.

mixing

This is pretty much the first step in any bread making. It’s all about getting the water combined with the flour (and other ingredients) to form your dough.

All you need to do is use a spoon to mix the wet and dry ingredients together with a spoon until there are no more dry spots visible.

While you can use a mechanical mixer to mix your doughs (this is what happens mostly in commercial bakeries), the recipes in this home bread making class have been designed to be mixed by hand. So there’s no need to invest in a fancy kitchen aid stand mixer to become a brilliant baker.

kneading

Kneading is where the dough is mixed further to develop the gluten and give your bread it’s wonderful texture. The role of gluten is to make the dough elastic and trap any carbon dioxide or air bubbles released by the yeast. Without gluten bread doesn’t have it’s wonderful light, springy texture.

For most of the recipes in this class, you won’t need to knead. This is because we’re using the long, overnight action of the yeast to develop the gluten for us.

But for the few recipes that do require kneading, such as the pizza, flat bread and fougasse, it’s all about trying to keep the dough as wet as possible. And work it as much as possible to develop the gluten and give us the texture we’re looking for.

Standard dough kneading adds flour if the dough gets sticky, but I’ve found that embracing the stickiness allows you to have a wetter dough (a good thing!). Rather than explain in words, I’ve put together a little kneading demonstration video.

[insert kneading video here]

resting

With our overnight method, the resting is inbuilt so there’s no need to worry about it.

For the kneaded doughs, resting is required to allow the gluten strands to relax back into their original position. This is really important in pastry making but can also help with bread. If you don’t rest your dough the shape can distort.

forming

Forming is where you shape your loaf.

For our standard round loaves, this involves turning the wet dough out onto a floured surface and pulling the edges in towards the centre to form a round loaf.

For flat bread and pizza, I find it’s easiest to use a rolling pin (or a glass bottle) to roll the dough out to the desired shape. You can do this by hand but I find rolling helps get a thinner crust for pizza.

The other type of loaf we’re using in the class is to bake in a loaf tin. For the Irish Soda Bread, it’s about lining the tin first then scraping the dough into the tin and letting it form the loaf in the oven.

baking

baking setups
In a commercial bakery, the oven are designed to go to much higher temperatures than our home ovens. They also have the luxury of steam injection. Steam is useful because it prevents the crust from forming straight away, meaning the loaf can rise in the oven as it bakes. Then at then end of the baking process the crust is allow to brown and form.

In a normal domestic oven, the dry heat means the crust starts forming straight away. This prevents the loaf expanding in the heat of the oven. So you end up with a denser bread. Some people suggest spraying water into the oven when you put the bread in. But I’ve found this doesn’t create enough steam to make a difference.

The reason we bake most of our loaves in a preheated cast iron pan is twofold. First it maximises the heat in the oven. Second, it captures any steam being released from the bread, giving it its own version of steam injection. This means we get maximum expansion, just like a commercial bakery. We then remove the lid for the final baking stage to let the loaf brown and crust up.

For flat bread and pizza, the steam thing isn’t important because we aren’t looking for a super tall loaf. The thing that is important for these two types of bread is getting a high heat to cook the dough quickly. It’s also important to have even heat from the top and bottom. The solution for these two is to use a pizza stone placed directly on the base of your oven to maximise the heat.

testing for doneness
A deep golden colour is the first sign to tell you whether your loaf is sufficiently cooked or not.

The next step is to tap the base of your bread. If it sound hollow, then it’s probably cooked.

When you cut into the cooled loaf, the internal crumb should be light and spongey without being damp or soggy. If you find a gooey line at the base of the bread once it’s cut, then your loaf is underbaked. Next time bake it for longer before removing the lid.

cooling

As the bread cools it is still cooking. If you cut into your loaf too soon, it can be underdone in the middle. It can be tough, but try and wait until the loaf is at room temperature before digging in! Although if you’re super hungry, slightly doughy loaf won’t be the end of the world.

To avoid sweating and losing your lovely crust, make sure you cool the loaf on a wire rack so that air can circulate underneath.

Also make sure you don’t cover hot bread with a tea towel or anything else that will trap in the steam. I did this once and ended up with soggy, wrinkly bread. I won’t make that mistake twice.

back to Simple Breadmaking at Home Overview