How To Bake Perfect Bread The This Is This Way

Baking bread doesn’t take much time. OK, it does, but it doesn’t take time from you. Time’s going to happen anyway, and the bread will take care of that, leaving you free to buy car insurance from Iggy Pop.

Baking bread is all about mathematics. There are ratios involving weight and time, and it’s dead easy. Dough is four things, mainly – water, flour, yeast and time, and the ratio for dough is five parts flour to three parts water. By parts, I mean weight, because the one good thing about being under the tyranny of the metric system, a milliliter of water wieghs a gram, so it’s easy. There’s also a time ratio, but I’ll come to that.

I’ve been baking bread for about four years and make all kinds of types. My favourite is a foccacia, which takes a little more time, but it is an incredible rustic, artisan bread. If you’re interested I’ll post that here later.

My basic bread has changed slightly over the years as I’ve made alterations to make it really good and simple to make and full of flavours, because often breads are made too quickly or everything is thrown together, bread machine style, and it’s fine, but it’s not great.

I’ll get to the recipe in a second, right after I tell you this calls for a bread mixer. You can mix the dough by hand, but that takes longer and you need more room and you have to wash up, which takes away time I was promising.

Ingredients

500 grams strong bread flour
300 mil lukewarm water
1 ½ teaspoons of dry instant yeast
1 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of sugar

1. Put the yeast and sugar in the water, leave for ten minutes, stir in gently until desolved. Don’t use hot water, you’ll kill the yeast.

2. Put a third of the flour in a large bowl and pour in the water and yeast mixture. Stir this together until it’s not lumpy and you have something that looks like a batter. Cover with cling film and leave this aside to at room temperature for half an hour and it will bubbles and rise slightly. This is called a sponge, which is something your bread machine can’t do. The sponge, together with step one activates the yeast and it’s like baking with a fresh, active yeast. It’s called a poolish and it makes a big difference. The flavours and blend in and your bread rises better.

3. Spoon the poolish into your mixing bowl, add the remaining flour and salt and set your mixer on the lowest setting for one minute, then onto medium for four. Don’t worry if it looks too watery to begin with, it might take a while to mix in. If after three minutes it’s too dry, looking powdery and stringy like it’s not coming together, add water, one tablespoon at a time as you mix it. If it’s too wet, like it’s shiny and too sticky, then add a heaped tablespoon of flour. You can mix it more if you need to, to gather up any additional flour or water – up to eight minutes is ok but that’s about it.

4. When your dough is ready, you should be able to poke a dent in it with your finger and feel some resistance and it will spring back slightly. It should be firm but not sticky.

5. Grease down a big bowl with olive oil by brushing a little around the sides. Form the dough into a ball and put it in the bowl. Brush the top of the dough with a little of the oil and cover with cling film. The oil will stop the dough sticking to the film when it rises, doubling or even tripling in size. If you don’t have oil, you can put a little flour on the counter. If you’ve run out of bowl, you can dust of the counter and lay lightly greased cling film over the top on the dough and let it rise there. The main thing is time and room temperature. It’ll take about an hour to two hours. Two is best.

6. Now that the flavours and all the air is driving your dough crazy, it’s time to knock it back. You can put it back in your mixer for thirty seconds, but to be honest, I like to do this by hand. It makes me feel like I’ve done the whole thing mano with manos. Punch it out, getting rid of all the air, which you’ll feel as you do it. Now it’s time for second rise.

7. Breads are like Jesus. They need to rise again. The second rise is important, because that’s the one where your bread is going to rise into a the shape you’re going to bake it in. But now your bread is angry. It wants to be baked, and you’ve just punched it down. Don’t worry – as I said, it is going to rise again, like Jesus. Or The South. This will happen by itself, leaving you free to go out and burn all the cotton.

The mathematics thing I was talking about – your second rise will take half the time of your first rise. So if your bread doubled in size in two hours, punch it back and shape it and let it rise for an hour.

8. Put the bread in a flour-dusted 1-pound loaf tin, or put it in a ball on a floured baking tray or a pizza baking stone if you have one (this is what you’re going to cook it in, so make sure it’s ovenproof) and cover it with a light tea towel or kitchen roll. Cling film will restrict its growth at this point and you don’t want to end up with dense bread. Let it rise – it should double in size again.

9. Heat your the oven to 250C, or 230C for fan assisted ovens. Put a watertight baking dish on the bottom shelf of the oven. I’ll come back to this. The oven needs to heat up now while the bread is rising, leaving you to sit with your thoughts, free to contemplate the mysterious, celestial beauty of the David Borealis.

10. After a second while, your oven will be nice and really hot, and it needs to stay that way, so you need to keep the door shut as long as possible and you need to act fast. Get a pint glass full of very cold water – you’re going to pour this into the hot baking dish on the bottom shelf. This will create a lot of steam which will give your bread a nice crust without the fake, eggy glaze they put on supermarket baked bread. Steam baking is the way to go.

11. If you lose heat while the door is open, just keep it close a few minutes and let it warm up again. But remember to act fast. Because perfect bread has to get a good hot start. Ready? Is the cloth or towel off the bread? Right. And…. opentheovendoorandputthebreadonamediumtohigshelfinthemiddleoftheovenandshutthedoorshutit!shutitNOW!

12. Phew. Now you bake it at 250C (230C fan-assisted) for ten minutes. Then drop the heat to 210C (190C fan assisted) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Don’t worry if the water evaporates from the tray during baking. Anything more than a pint would be too much. I’ve heard of bakers putting ice cubes in a hot tray, and that might work, but I find really cold water gets that steam going and does a good job of replicating that steambaked effect.

13. When the time is up, take the bread out of the oven, and hit the loaf out of the tin otherwise it will go soggy. Tap the bread. It should sound hollow. It should resonate. If it’s not done, put it in for another five minutes, but it should be done. Leave it on a wire rack to cool. Don’t try and cut it yet, because your bread is still proving and dehumidifying.

That’s it. In all it takes about 15 minutes of actual work. Just remember 5:3 for flour and water and you’re set. You don’t even really need salt or sugar, but they help the rising time and the flavour a bit. Try molasses or maple syrup instead of sugar if you want, and you can always drizzle oil across the top of the bread before it goes in the oven, or brush with water and sprinkle with course salt. It’s up to you. Roll the dough out into baguettes if you like, or rolls, but shorten the cooking time because the bread surface area is greater.

Find your way. Work with it. Keep the poolish out all night before you bake. I do that when I’m going to start baking in the morning and the flavours really matter the next day.

It’s up to you, let me know how it goes, and have fun.

Also:
Perfect Bagels The This Is This Way