You may have figured out that I’m a little obsessed with healthy ingredients.  I like to make substitutions like brown rice for white, whole wheat flour for white and agave for sugar.  The following bread recipe is no exception, but the techniques work equally well with white flour with only slight variations to the amount of water added.

If you remember from part 2, the secrets to good bread are:

• A wet dough
• TIme
• Balancing the amount of yeast

I’m going to use all three of these techniques in the following recipe:

Whole Wheat Bread

Using 100% whole wheat flour in bread making can be a little tricky.  It has a lower percentage of glutin and the wheat bran tends to puncture the bubbles.  These two factors can result in a dense, heavy loaf.  To help this, I’ve added a little extra wheat gluten.  I’ve also added some brown rice flour because I’ve heard it helps to make a crisper crust.  We’ll see!

• 3 cups 100% whole wheat flour + 1 cup for use later (photo 1)
• 1/4 cup wheat gluten
• 1/4 cup brown rice flour
• 1/4t yeast active dry yeast (photo 2)
• 1t salt
• water

Day 1 (remember that time is one of the secrets?)

Mix 3 cups of the whole wheat flour with the gluten and rice flour.  Add the yeast and salt and blend well.  Add enough water to make a wet dough somewhere between regular bread dough and cake batter.  If you’re using whole wheat flour it will probably take about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of water.  Just add water slowly until you end up with the right consistency.  I use a Kitchen Aid mixer with the paddle attachment (photo 3).  You want a dough too wet for the dough hook to do anything.  Scrape down the sides of the mixer bowl, spray the top with some non-stick spray and cover with a towel (photo 4).  Let rest somewhere until tomorrow.  I keep it in the oven.

Day 2 (or about 12 hours later)

Your dough should be even looser than before and more than double in size (photo 5+6).  At this point you want to gently knead in enough flour so the dough will hold a loaf shape but still be very soft.  Add a good 1/2 cup of flour to your work area and pour out the dough onto the flour (photo 7).  Fold the dough over onto itself until you’ve added enough flour for it to stay together in a round loaf (photo 8).  Dust the top well and cover with a towel to let rise for another couple of hours.

After a couple of hours you’ll have something roughly double in size (photo 9).  Preheat the oven to 450F.  If you have a cast iron enamed or ceramic dutch oven, put that in the oven to preheat.  Baking a loaf in one of these pots has many advantages.  Check out the NY Times article on this.  My dutch oven is a little big so I’m going to end up with a flatter loaf, but still just as tasty.  Once the pot is heated thoroughly, carefully turn the dough out into the pot and cover (photo 10).  Bake covered for 30 min.  After 30 min remove the lid and bake another 15-30 min until done.  It should have a hollow sound when thumped (photo 11+12).

Let the finished loaf cool thoroughly on a wire rack or stove grate.  My loaf was still pretty dense, but incredibly tasty (photo 13).  The crust was thin and crisp.  The interior was incredibly moist and chewy with irregular air pockets.  Swapping some of the whole wheat flour with white flour would have helped.  I love the idea of using whole wheat with nothing removed so I will probably keep making it this way.

I hope your loaf turns out as good!  In the next part, I’m going to take an existing recipe and modify it to use these bread baking secrets.  If you have a suggestion for a recipe to start with, post a comment.  Maybe I’ll use your recipe!

The post The perfect loaf of bread (part 3) appeared first on Frugal Cooking.

• The My Favorite Pain au Levain recipe
• Jim Varasano’s NY pizza recipe page
• The NY Times article on the Sullivan Street bakery

The methods in these articles break away from the traditional bread making techniques that seem to fill nearly every cookbook published.  It wasn’t obvious to me first, but these recipes have three main things in common that really make them special.  These three common items are the keys to good bread baking.

The first secret is a very wet dough.  By wet dough, I mean a dough that has a lot more water than most recipes.  The first pain au levain recipe calls for making a “levain” starter that is very loose and then combining with more flour and water.  The other two recipes call for making a base dough with a lot more water than normal.  The wet dough allows for the gluten in the flour to be more mobile in the dough.  This mobility allows the gluten to develop more fully, which is otherwise done by kneading for a long time.  A wet dough eliminates the need for the long kneading time but still yielding an even better structure.

The second secret is time.  All three recipes require much longer than most recipes.  This extra time could be one day in the case of the Sullivan Street recipe or up to six days in the case of Jim Varasano’s pizza recipe.  This extra time or “aging” helps the flour develop a much richer and more complex flavor.  This is largely responsible for the elimination of the common “homebaked” taste that most recipes yield.  If you want to make great bread, it’s going to take at least a day.

The third secret is less yeast.  This is largely possible due to secret #2 above.  With this aging period the yeast will have more time to multiply and create CO2 so you won’t need nearly as much.  You’ll also get some naturally occurring yeast from the air which will add additional complex flavors and structure.  The resulting loaf tastes more like store-bought bread and less like yeasty homemade bread.

So now that you know the secrets, how do we use them to make the best bread ever?  There are a few tricks to apply these techniques into your breadmaking.

The first trick is to adjust rise temperature so you can age the dough as long as you like without the yeast burning out.  For aging a day or less, I’d let the dough sit at cool room temperature.  For aging longer than a day, I’d keep the dough in the refrigerator and take it out at least a couple of hours before baking.  After some experimentation, you’ll learn how much yeast you need and how long to age the dough to get the results you want.  It’s going to be different depending on whether you’re trying to make a sandwith loaf, ciabatta, french loaf, etc… I often make small batches of dough and keep them aging in the fridge so I can make a small loaf any time I feel like it.

The next trick is to knead in enough flour near the end to make a dough of the right consistency for baking.  The wet dough is great for aging but doesn’t always bake well.  Ideally, you want to very lightly knead in some flour and then let the dough rest for 20-30 min before baking.

Finally, the baking technique is the last trick.  I’d usually go hotter than your recipe calls for.  Baking at 400F yields a nicer color and crust than you’ll get at a lower temperature.  The baking technique described in the Sullivan Street recipe yields a loaf with an amazing crust.  You should definitely try it!  Sometimes I will even bake flatbreads on the grill.  You can also try baking in a pre-heated cast iron skillet.

All of these techniques require a little practice, but once you get the hang of them, you can turn any recipe into something better than any bakery.

You’re going to want to have some flour and yeast on hand for the next installment because it’s time to bake some bread!  I’ll provide a general formula recipe you can use right away to make your best loaf ever.  I’ll go into exactly what your wet dough should look like and how to get it ready for the oven.  I’ll also provide some hints for how to modify an existing recipe to use these techniques.

If youâ€d like to be notified when part 3 is posted, take a look at the Why Subscribe? page for a list of all the ways you can sign up for notification of new posts.

The post The perfect loaf of bread (part 2) appeared first on Frugal Cooking.

Let me start by saying that the secret doesn’t involve any special ingredients.  In fact, the best loaf I’ve made had nothing but ordinary flour, water, salt and yeast.  There is also NO one secret recipe.  The secret is all in the technique and can be used to make any number of different types of bread.

I first have to give credit to this bread recipe I came across.  I think it was on a Martha Stewart TV show or web site.  This recipe is responsible for my one miracle loaf that actually tasted like amazing bakery bread.  The recipe is incredibly complicated and takes a long time, but did yield incredible results.  It was so complicated that, in fact, I only made one loaf.  At the time, I didn’t realize why this recipe worked so well, but I do now.

I next credit Jim Varasano for writing the best page on homemade NY-style pizza.  The first “lightbulb” went on when I read this on his page:

There are about a hundred books and internet recipes that claim to give an authentic or secret pizza dough recipe. Oddly, while many claim to be secret or special, they are practically all the same. Here it is in summary. If you see this recipe, run screaming:

Sprinkle a yeast packet into warm water between 105-115 F and put in a teaspoon of sugar to feed it. Wait for it to foam up or  ‘proof’. Add all your flour to a Kitchen Aid heavy duty mixer, then add the yeast and salt. Now mix until it pulls away from the side of the bowl. Coat with oil and leave in a warm place until it doubles in bulk, about 1-2 hours. Punch down, spread on a peel with some cornmeal to keep it from sticking and put it on the magical pizza stone that will make this taste just like Sally’s in your 500F oven.

I assure you, this will not make anything like a real pizza. It’s weird – even chefs whose other recipes all come out pretty good, like Emeril, simply pass around more or less this same terrible recipe.

I instantly realized that this was also true of bread recipes- they’re all the same!  Now Jim goes on to break down every possible detail of dough making and ingredient selection.  He definitely has mastered the art of pizza making!  I knew making good bread couldn’t be this complicated but I could see his results were impressive.  His recipe was completely different from the recipe in the link above but there were some similarities in the techniques.

Soon after I discovered Jim’s pizza page, my sister sent me a link to this NY Times article on Jim Lahey and the Sullivan St Bakery.  Now this is one recipe I followed to the letter.  Their technique is amazingly simple AND yields incredible results!  Check out this video:

Now I was really starting to see a pattern in these recipes.  Have you figured out what it is?

Stay tuned for the next episode where I’m going to itemize these secrets to bread baking and show you how to apply them to any bread recipe.

If you’d like to be notified when part 2 is posted, take a look at the Why Subscribe? page for a list of all the ways you can sign up for notification of new posts.

The post The perfect loaf of bread (part 1) appeared first on Frugal Cooking.