Bread Making: The Basis and Top 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
A Beginners Guide to Bread Making and the Top 5 Most Common Mistakes to Avoid Approaching Home Baking (I made almost all of them), Bread in Particular, but Mostly Valid for Any Lavender Items.
To master the Art of Homemade Bread Making, we must start with a fundamental question; What makes the best homemade bread?
Let's Start from the basis
Flour, water, and yeast are present in most of them, with either salt or sugar, depending on whether you will use sour or sweet. All of these must work together in harmony; it's pure chemistry, so let's have a look at them:
Flour
Each type of flour has different processing procedures and characteristics, specific nutritional values, and specific protein and mineral concentrations, which also give it various colours and tastes. Soft wheat flour, for example, is white, while durum wheat flour, which is rich in proteins (also known as "Strong Flour", is more yellow/amber.
Water
Water is the most indispensable ingredient for leavened products, as it is the basis for chemical and enzymatic reactions necessary for fermentation. It must be chosen carefully and treated with attention: not all waters are the same, and not all lend themselves to perfect leavening.
The most suitable for preparing bread must always be drinkable, clear, and free of particular odours and flavours, but not excessively hard (i.e., not too rich in magnesium and calcium salts).
Bakers must consider the water's hardness, temperature, and water/flour ratio.
Gluten
The "secret agent" transforms the mixture of water, flour, and yeast into a fragrant, honeycombed loaf of bread.
Gluten is formed during the kneading of bread dough. When hydrated, the glutenin and gliadin proteins (approximately 30 and 50%, respectively, of the total protein in wheat grain) almost immediately bind and form gluten. The longer glutenin pieces link up with each other via disulfide bonds to create resilient and stretchy units of molecules.
For the geeks: Gliadin is believed to contribute to the flow properties, while glutenin contributes to its elasticity and strength. Glutelin is a protein found in plant seeds, such as rice, wheat, and maize. Because of its unique molecular structure and composition, it is insoluble in water. Glutelin molecules consist of long chains of amino acids folded and twisted into a complex three-dimensional shape.
In layman's terms, gluten is the cement that holds our dough together.
NOTE: Not all flours contain gluten and those that don't require different techniques and ingredients to support bread-making.
Yeast
We can produce bread, pizza, etc., because of the yeast's live bacteria. These bacteria feed on the sugar contained in the dough, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol in a process called fermentation. The more yeast, the more bacteria, the faster the sugar will eat. The sugar. The result is gas, which is needed to raise our dough.
Temperature
Temperature also affects these bacteria; the higher the temperature, the more active the bacteria become, eating the sugar faster.
What does it mean for us?
A dough with insufficient bacterial activity (not enough Yeast vs Time) will result in a very elastic dough that is difficult to stretch as it will bounce back.
A dough where the bacteria almost consume the sugar will result in a sticky, guy-kind dough, which I would use for a cake, as it will be impossible to stretch as it will break.
As always, perfection is in the middle; you want to achieve a dough with retained elasticity (or it will break) that you can stretch without bouncing back. The only way to get there is by trying.
Now let's look at 5 of the most common mistakes in bread-making to avoid them.
We have all made some of these mistakes at some point in our bread-making journey; I most certainly made most of these, and from each error, I have learned something new.
1. Work With the Right Tools
Baking is a complicated science that is made up of manageable things. It means, in a nutshell, that you don't need huge budgets or astronaut equipment to start churning out something good. In general, very few tools are enough, most of the time already available at your home, or in any case, a limited expense to get off to a great start. Yet, there are tools without which making bread at home becomes much less efficient, precise and satisfying.
Let's face it unless we are crazy and nerds, those who have stopped buying in bakeries and who self-produce bread every day, we all knead for passion, as a hobby and for leisure, carving out time for the weekend away from work and housework.
We are therefore compelled to fit our special moments with water and flour between one errand and another, with a constant danger if making bread has to become a burden, fatigue and a waste of time; it turns out that the second time we are fed up and that the new passion becomes a flash in the pan.
Why not make our lives easier by working more orderly, more aware, and, more precisely, avoiding downtime, errors, and useless tools?
To make the bread as it should be, you need very few things:
The Dough Scraper / Cutter is your secret weapon, useful for infinite purposes, including recovering the dough from the machine or the bowl after kneading, closing it, breaking it into the desired weights, and, above all, giving you a big hand in cleaning the work surface. Trust me, for organisation freaks like me, it's essential. This is the one I got, but hundreds of options are available in the market.
A wooden shovel to bake your one kilo of joy shape unless you want to overturn it directly from the container to the pan or use a very comfortable (but expensive) cast iron pot. I got a few of them until I realised that the wooden one below was the best. The Doug doesn't stick if floured enough, and it's also the cheapest.
A Slashing Tool, to score the top of bread. Scoring means cutting into the lump of dough that you're about to bake. It usually applies to things like crusty white bread or sourdough boules, the style of bread with a crisp, crackly crust and a tender interior. This is the one I got, but hundreds of options are available in the market.
A baking stone prevents soggy bottoms, but remember that you must heat the baking stone before cooking your bread to perform optimally. It must be scorching to release the heat slowly during the backing process.
The rest of the tools for making good bread at home are nice but not essential.
An infrared thermometer measures the temperature of the dough and the cooking surface on which the loaf will be baked. It costs a few euros and will change your life, guaranteed.
Raising baskets for the final leavening of the dough, complete with a linen cloth, are handy for guaranteeing a regular shape and allowing the surface of the dough to rise without drying. These come in different shapes and are nice to have as they help produce a consistent-looking loaf of bread, but you can use a standard bowl covered with a kitchen cloth; the result will not be identical, but for starters, it's okay. I got a few of them in different shapes as I like to vary and test; there are mainly two options available in the market, the round and the oval, in various sizes.
Planetary or mixers are not essential for bread. Indeed, you would be amazed at how many professionals recommend making stretching by hand. Working by hand helps you develop sensitivity and familiarise yourself with dough, overcoming many fears when playing with water and flour.
Have you equipped yourself with the baking tools you need?
2. Randomly Mixing Flour
Now that you are ready to start, please don't rush to the supermarket; grab the first few sacks of flour from the shelf. A bit of this, a bit of that...
Or decide to start working with ancient grains, as these are wonderful but not that easy to master, and a failure at this early stage can be deflating. I suggest sticking to the basics and buying good quality (type 1 or 2), Strong White, stone-ground flour to begin with, learn, and then move to more challenging grains.
Flour is and will always be the principal ingredient of any baking product; to start baking good bread, you need to understand it as your primary raw material, and choosing it appropriately it's paramount.
If you want to learn more about flours, click here.
When you start buying your flours, note the Maker and the results. Testing and learning about your raw materials is essential, as each product differs profoundly from the others. It can absorb variable quantities of water or be workable far less than others.
But above all, follow the recipes and hope for the best.
3. Overwork the dough
Overworking a doug means keeping mixing it after its readiness point. This is more likely to happen if using a dough maker. The result is that your dough will overheat the dough (your dough should never reach a temperature over 26° C) and break the glutinous net (which supports your bread structure), resulting in a disaster.
I speak from a lot of direct experience on this topic, as before understanding that this was related to overheating the dough, I had wasted kilos and kilos of flour.
TIP: To limit the risk, use icy water. I usually store mine in the refrigerator.
4. Incorrect Resting Periods
For leavened products is paramount to understand when they are ready to go in the oven.
For properly honeycombing, your dough must rise upwards to at least double its size without losing structural integrity (as explained above in the Gluten section).
If you don't leave your bread resting long enough, it will not be raised appropriately, resulting in hard bread with poor honeycombing.
If you leave your bread resting for too long, the yeast will have eaten the whole sugar in the dough, resulting in a loss of structural integrity and its collapse.
Because of the variety of styles and raw materials used in bread-making, it's extremely important to choose the right vessel for your bread type. This is especially true in the presence of flours or weak cereals, such as rye. These types of bread require a different logic and are normally baked inside rectangular tins to prevent collapsing.
4. Ensure to Follow the Correct Baking Process
Once again, it is extremely important to be clear about the style of bread you wish to make. For some (e.g., France Baguette), steam presence in the baking chamber is necessary, which slows down the formation of the crust and allows the bread to grow in height.
For this technique, you place a metal container filled with water inside the oven. Then, halfway through cooking, you remove the container and slightly open the oven door (I normally use a knife to keep the door slightly open) to allow the steam to escape and the bread to dry, which results in the development of a nice crispy crust.
The quality of the oven is essential for a good result, if your oven (like mine) is not great, you can help with a baking stone, as suggested above. If you don't have one, you could use a flipped large iron pan to achieve similar results.
Or there is another nice baking tecnique you can use a cast iron pot to bake in, this becoming very hot and with the lid creates a baking environment inside onother. If you want to use this technique, you must raise your dough already inside the pot, with the ld on. In this phase, the lid closure creates a humid environment thanks to the surface evaporation of the dough and allows the dough to grow, while in the second phase, once the lid is removed, you will allow the bread to dry and form the much-desired crust.
TIP: How to know if the bread is baked correctly?
I would suggest one of the following methods:
Temperature: if measured at the core with a probe thermometer, it must be at least 90° C;
Dry crumb: you know the usual trick of the toothpick for cakes? The same, but you need a longer one. Then, insert a toothpick in the loaf; if it is dry, it is ready; otherwise, it must be left to dry for some time;
Knock Knock: knock the bottom of the bread; if it sounds empty, it's ready.
5. Make sure to score the top of the bread
Scoring bread dough with decorative cuts serves an important purpose: it guides a loaf to rise consistently, controlled, and optimally. But from there, let your creativity run free. As the old saying goes, we eat first with our eyes.
With a blade in hand and a shaped round of dough on the workbench, bakers have an unexpected blank canvas before them.
I hope you found this article insightful, if you have or you wish to suggest any improvement to it, please log in and leave a comment.