Baking bread
For the last few weeks I’ve been baking bread. It’s been a lot of fun, and much of the bread has been great!
It started just before Christmas when we got a Kitchenaid mixer that my wife had wanted for a while. I decided to try it out on bread dough.
During one of our book-buying sprees a couple of years ago, we picked up The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, by Peter Reinhart. I had tried out his technique for pizza dough (in American Pie) with success, so I started to study his bread baking techniques. He’s very big on preparing portions of the dough ahead of time and allowing it to “ferment”, and he also talks a lot about the chemical reactions that go on when preparing and baking the dough; I’m not sure that I follow all of the details, but I got the basic idea and decided to start with his recipe for French bread.
The first day I prepared the portion to be “fermented” - just flour, water, salt, and yeast, mixed in the mixer then kneaded with the dough hook, then stored overnight in the refrigerator. I finished the loaves the next day, with more flour, water, salt, and yeast, mixed with yesterday’s dough, then kneaded with the dough hook. After various periods of resting and rising, I shaped the dough into three long skinny cylinders, preheated the oven (and pizza stone) as hot as it would go, and slid the loaves onto the pizza stone. After about 20 minutes, I had these beautiful baguettes on the cooling rack, and in another hour I was savoring some delicious bread.
Since then I’ve tried whole wheat loaves (pretty good, but I used some rye flour that gave it a slightly “off” taste; I’ll probably try it again with corn meal instead), Viennese bread (very nice sandwich bread), and, my favorite, Pain a l’Ancienne (”bread made in the traditional way”). The pain a l’ancienne is truly amazing - a very crusty, airy baguette with a very subtle sweetness, and it’s made only with flour, water, yeast, and salt.
What’s nice about all of these recipes is that most of the work is done by the mixer, and most of the time involved is just waiting for the dough to rise or ferment or whatever else it’s supposed to do. My actual working time is maybe 15 minutes the first day, followed by another 15 to 20 minutes the next day.