Bread Primer: Simple Wheat Loaf
If you follow me on instagram, or listen to the Tog & Thel podcast, you’ll know that aside from sheep, wool and all things Scandinavian, the other great love of my creative life is Bread.
I’ve been baking all my own bread at home for the past decade. And in my early years of bread baking, being entirely self-taught in the art, I have memories of spending hours…no weeks…. actually, more like months…. well, really closer to ‘years’….poring over every pro-patisserie and bread book I could get my hands on, glued to youtube clips on shaping and slashing from the San Francisco baking institute, and watching seasoned French baking masters in a state of permanent awe. Trawling and skulking around the veritable rabbits’ tunnels of information and education at the Fresh Loaf…and reading enough bread and levain related chemistry to be awarded an honorary doctorate in the matter…(ok maybe not quite so much). So yes, to me Raymond Calvel is nothing short of a modern-day God.
So it should come as no surprise that I consider the craft of bread baking to be the highest expression of all the baking arts. It really is the most finely tuned dance between nit-picky science based knowledge and observation, and the ability to bring an artistic flair for improvisation, and on-the-spot creative problem solving based on the ever changing amount of variables that have an effect on whether a loaf works, or doesn’t quite work, on any given day.
This bread primer takes on the format of a step-by-step tutorial for the most part, with my tried-and-true recipe for a basic wheat loaf given at the very end.
* Make sure to click on the photos to see full size versions of them; details are key at this stage in your learning so make sure that you take a good look at each of the pics to follow along as you make your loaf.
Following are some things to keep in mind to avoid both frustration and demoralisation as you embark on what may be a long, but entirely worthy journey towards home-made bread perfection.
Ambient temperature and ambient humidity in your kitchen on any given day will have a huge impact on how your dough behaves at each stage of the process.
Always use the full amount of flour given in a formula or recipe, but remember that the quantity of liquid used will change according to humidity levels in your kitchen and in your ingredients.
My recipes/formulas use a much higher level of hydration – i.e. ratio of water to total amount of flour used – than you may be used to seeing in your average blog-recipe or home-baker bread book. I aim for between 68% and 70% hydration in even my most basic loaves, and higher for things like baguettes and artisanal loaves.
Learn to get comfortable handling higher-hydration doughs and you will be paid in dividends with improved crumb structure and lovely, light loaves with perfect gluten development.
For such a large batch of dough, utilizing a larger quantity of flour, I like to use my standing Kitchenaid mixer with the dough hook to do the kneading. Anytime I make loaves up to and under 500g of flour I use my hands to knead.
When i’m talking of ‘ambient temperature’, I mean the average temperature of a bread baker’s kitchen, i.e. between 21 degrees – 23 degrees celsius.
Finally, weigh everything!! I absolutely refuse to give volume based recipes or formulas for bread baking as 1., I don’t use the system myself, and 2., bread baking relies so much on accurate measuring of ingredients, where even the slightest deviation can lead to different results. The only way to be sure of what you’re doing each time is to measure, measure, measure!
A list of simple tools I believe all aspiring bread bakers should have:
a Danish dough whisk, for getting all doughs to shaggy-dough/autolyse stage;
at least one bench scraper;
a large piece of firmly woven cloth, made of natural fibers such as flax or heavy linen, to use as a couche;
either a french style banetton (dough raising wicker basket) or, my personal preference, a German style brotform, or a bowl of some kind to raise your shaped loaves in for the final proof;
and a weighing scale!
After having listed these items, I will go on to say that you should really be able to make a perfect loaf of bread with nothing but a large bowl, flour, salt, yeast, water and your pair of hands. But, as in all things, when you’re starting out, these tools can help break you in gently.
Begin by bringing together the wet ingredients, the molasses, water, and salt together, giving it a quick whisk to combine. Then mix together, in your large mixing bowl, the flours and the instant yeast powder.
Now get yourself your Danish dough whisk, if you have one. If you don’t, just a big wooden spoon or your hands will do. Pour in the water and salt mixture, remembering to hold back some water if it’s a wet/cloudy day or have some extra ready if it’s a particularly dry day. Just combine the flour and the liquid till it reaches what I call ‘the shaggy dough stage’, which you can see in the second picture; notice that although all the flour has been coated with some liquid there is still a nice, dry coating of flour over the whole shaggy-dough. Cover this with cling wrap or a tea towel, and leave for about 40 minutes on the counter. When autolyse, or dough hydration, has happened the shaggy dough should look like the 3rd picture; see how the dough is looking noticeably wetter and there’s far fewer dry patches in the whole lump? That’s what you want to see; the automatic hydration and plumping up of the flour molecules by the H2O.
Once the dough is at this stage, either using your hands or your stand mixer, knead the dough for 7 minutes (on power 2 for your kitchenaid) or until the dough has been kneaded past the sticky stage, is no longer clinging to the sides of the bowl, but is still barely sticking to the bottom of the bowl and soft enough to be able to stretch it as you can see in the first pic below. A properly hydrated and not over-kneaded dough should feel soft and flowey at this stage, and not a firm, springy dough ball as you might imagine.
The gluten in the flour is just beginning to be developed, but should not be fully firmed up just yet. A lot of this work will happen gently through the bulk fermentation stage and the stretch-and-fold stage that’s coming up. Tuck the dough in under itself to form a smooth ball, and place it in a lightly greased bowl. Cover with cling-wrap and leave at room temp, for about 30 mins.
After a 30 min rest, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured, or oiled, work surface and follow the images above to stretch-and-fold the dough in on itself, completing something like a letter-fold, with an extra vertical-fold added in at the end.
Tighten up the dough ball, place it back in the greased rising container, and allow to bulk ferment for 45-60 mins; less if your ambient temperature is warmer than average (summer kitchen), more if it is cooler (winter kitchen).
At the end of the bulk ferment there are some truly scientific and, to me at least, fascinating ways to gauge that a dough is optimally fermented, or ‘proofed’, which is the colloquialism that’s most commonly used to describe this stage. At this early stage of your bread career, and for such a simple loaf, two tests should suffice.
One, that the dough should rise to approximately double its volume. And two, a slightly more precise indicator than the former, that when you gently poke a lightly flour-covered finger into the side of the risen dough, the indentation it makes in the dough should spring back slightly, but not fill in the indent completely. If the poke-mark springs back very slowly or not at all, the dough is under-proofed – the gluten structure still under-developed- and should be left alone and checked again in a few minutes. If the poke mark springs back so fast that it completely fills in the indent, then the dough is fast over-proofing, leaving no space for growth and expansion inside the oven. With practice and experience you’ll learn to tell, with each different type of loaf, what level of development the gluten is at at any given stage in the process, by touch and by sight.
Once the dough is proofed, it’s time to knock-down, divide and pre-shape, if you’re making two smaller loaves, or go straight to shaping if you’re making a single large loaf. The ‘knocking-down’ of a risen loaf is something that should happen naturally, and without force, when you turn the dough out of the bowl and onto a floured work surface. There’s no need to get as aggressive as the term ‘knocking-out’ implies. Let the dough flow naturally onto the work surface, divide in two, flatten gently into a circular shape, and follow the images below to fold each circle in on itself in segments, until you’ve formed a loosely formed ball shape; this will become a boule after the final shaping. Let the pre-shapes rest for 10 mins. While they are resting, prepare your bowls or banettons by lining them with tea towels and dusting with flour.
Then, as you can see from the final image below, make yourself a diagonal line going across the work surface, from one corner towards the other. Start tucking and turning the dough ball, cupping the sides of your palms under the dough ball, guiding and rolling it towards yourself as you tuck and turn, creating a layer of surface tension, like tightening a drum skin, over the ball of dough.
Once both boules are formed (or one large boule), pinch the seam at the bottom tightly closed, and place the boule, seam side up, in the cloth lined bowls or banneton. Cover with a damp tea-towel and leave to rise, for the final ferment, for another 60 mins.
30-40 minutes before you bake, put your bread stone and steaming apparatus into the oven and turn your oven on to 470F. This is what my oven-setup looks like.
A cast iron stone on the middle rack, plus two old oven trays filled with lava rocks on the oven floor for steam; these will be filled with boiling water just prior to the loaves going in. By no means do you need this to bake this, or any other bread. I bake a lot of bread at Cottage Caneton, but if you’re an infrequent baker simply bake your loaf in a dutch oven pot, with the lid on for the first 20 minutes, to create a steamy environment for your loaf to rise in…or spray some water into the sides of oven wall when you first put the loaves in.
Once the boules have puffed up and risen noticeably, prepare either a baking tray lined with two small strips (or one large strip) of baking parchment….or a pizza/bread peel dusted with semolina or lined with a strip of parchment. Upturn the boules onto the baking tray as gently as possible, so as not to knock out the air pockets formed during the final proof. For the large single loaf, the best way to do this is to lay the peel/baking tray on the loaf, as shown in the picture below, and flip the bowl over while holding onto both the peel and bowl together, causing the least disturbance of the boule during transfer.
Now, using either a sharp knife, a razor blade or a bread lamé, slash the surface of the boule in several places to allow expansion in the oven. Artistry in slashing technique is something that comes with time and practice, and is also closely tied to forming and shaping technique. So at this stage the only thing you really need to focus on is to get a few slashes in, wherever you like, to allow the dough to expand without bursting during baking.
Slide the dough into the hot oven (with steam if you’re using it), and bake on 245C/470F for 10 minutes. After 10 mins, turn the oven down to 180C/350F, and bake for a further 30 mins, till the loaf/loaves look golden brown in colour.
To test if the bread is baked through, either insert an instant-read thermometer into the center-bottom of the loaf, and see if it reads between 88C/190F – 95C/200F. Or, tap the bottom of the loaf with your knuckles, listening for a hollow-sounding noise to say the loaf is done.
Now leave the loaf/loaves to cool completely on a wire rack before you cut into it, as the structure of the bread is still setting and will continue to do so till the crumb is mostly cooled down.
Slather on some good butter, and enjoy your delicious slice of homemade bready goodness. And remember, practice, practice, practice! There are very few loaves that turn out so bad that they can’t either be rescued as toast…or as yummy bread-pudding. So you have all the reasons to keep at it….and none to give up.
