How to make bread
I love fresh-baked bread. It smells so nice while it's in the oven,
and
it's so luscious and good. Making bread can be pretty easy and
hassle-free, but it was a nightmare for me when I first started. So
here is a collection of tips I've found useful to make any kind of
bread. Hopefully they will be helpful to you.
Preparation
First, make sure you set aside enough time. Making bread is
time-consuming, no matter how efficient you are. The dough has to be
kneaded, it has to rise (sometimes twice), and it has to bake. This all
takes at least a couple of hours.
Second, consider your work surface. It should be as hard and
non-porous as possible, to facilitate cleanup. You can always use a
cutting board, the larger the better.
Process
Actually making the dough is fairly straightforward. Bread can tolerate
many variations in the ingredients. Here are a few
key points to keep in mind.
- Don't kill the yeast. Your goal is to keep the yeast alive
and feeding until you actually bake the bread. For this, two things are
important: the temperature of the liquid, and the temperature of the
place where the dough will rise (more on this below). The liquid should
be warm enough to make the yeast hungry and make it start eating the
sugar, but if it's too hot the yeast will just die. A good test is to
stick a finger in the liquid. If it's too hot for you, it's too hot for
the yeast. On the other hand, if it feels cold to you, the bread will
take forever to rise. Similarly, the place where you put the dough to
rise should not be a furnace.
- Start with less flour than it says. Most bread recipes
overshoot the amount of flour you actually need, and a large portion of
the flour is meant to be kneaded in, not mixed in. The general rule of
thumb is to start with about half the flour indicated, then gradually
add more flour to arrive at the correct amount. When
the dough stops sticking to your hand, there is enough flour in the
dough.
- To knead the dough, put flour on your work surface. Don't
put too much or your bread will be tough. Flour your hands before you
touch the dough, particularly if you still have to add a lot of flour.
To add flour, just turn over the dough every so often to let it pick up
the flour from the surface. Add more as needed.
- Let the bread rise in the oven. To shorten the rising times,
you can preheat your oven to the lowest setting then turn it off. When
you're ready to put the bread in, check that the oven is not too warm
(don't kill that yeast!). If it is, just leave it open for a minute.
This usually halves the rising time for me. For the second rise, I
usually put the pan on the burners on top of my preheating oven. The
second rise always goes pretty fast for me.
Cleanup
If your hands are covered in sticky dough and you're starting to
panic, don't wash them. Flour them first, rub off the excess
dough, then use warm water and soap. Similarly, don't put water on
your
work surface immediately. Wipe off the excess flour first, then use a
paint scraper or a sturdy wooden spoon to scrape off the bulk of the
dough. Then
wash your surface. This seems very obvious but I had more than one
cleaning-related disaster when I started... I guess that says more about
me than about the breadmaking process.
That's it! I leave you with my
favorite bread recipe. Challah takes quite
a long time to make, but the dough has a wonderful feel to it and the
braiding is a lot of fun. It might not be the best first recipe
to try, but it always makes my day.
Katia's cooking page
Katia Hayati
Last updated December 2, 2005