Baking by Hand (4 page)

If you’re using extra grains in creating your own recipe, they shouldn’t make up much more than 20 percent of your total flour weight. Larger amounts will significantly affect your dough development, which is fine, but it might take more experimentation to create a great loaf.

Water temperature is the primary way we control initial dough temperature and, obviously, how we hydrate the flour. As a reference, 60 percent hydrated dough is very dry and tight, while an 85 percent hydrated dough is very loose.

In addition to adding flavor, salt serves to tighten the gluten structure of your developing dough. You’ll notice that as soon as you add your salt to your mix and work it in, the dough will start pulling away from the bowl. That’s why we add it after the initial resting period (the autolyse). Otherwise, it would tighten up the dough and make it harder for the protein to absorb water. Unless other salty ingredients are included in your recipe, your salt percentage should be a solid 2 percent of dough weight. We prefer to use fine sea salt in all of our breads at home for two reasons: It dissolves into the dough much more easily than does kosher or other coarser salt, and we just like the fact that it comes from the ocean. Scientifically speaking, though, sea salt and mined table salt are both pretty much sodium chloride. When we want larger crystals of salt on a focaccia or a savory tart, however, we go with your traditional kosher salt. If you’re not picky, use what you have on hand.

Here’s a basic rule for converting fine sea salt from measuring spoon units to grams, and vice versa:

1 teaspoon fine sea salt = 7 g

1 tablespoon fine sea salt = 21 g

There are three types you can buy:
fresh yeast
, which comes in “cakes;”
active dry yeast
, which needs to be activated with warm water to work; and
instant yeast
(also called “Rapid Rise™”), which can just be added to the mix. There is no discernible difference in the final product, whichever you use. We use instant yeast here at the bakery because of its stability and ease of use, and
all of the recipes in this book use instant
as well. But, if you want to use another kind, or it’s all you have on the shelf, here are the conversion factors:

Instant yeast to fresh yeast: multiply by 1.34

Instant yeast to active dry yeast: multiply by 3.19 (Just remember: Active dry yeast needs to be activated in warm water before incorporating. The package should have instructions.)

Here’s a basic rule for converting instant yeast from measuring spoon units to grams, and vice versa:

1 teaspoon instant yeast = 4 g

1 tablespoon instant yeast = 12 g

Because the essence of artisan baking is slow and low, it makes sense that it would be a boon to the dough to start it well ahead of the final mix. We have two primary starters that we use in our mixes, and they’re differentiated solely by their hydration levels. Take a portion of total water in the mix and a portion of your total flour, spike it with yeast and get that baby bubbling away 12 hours ahead of time. When the time comes to mix the dough, you’ll have developed a ton of organic acids that will heighten the depth of flavor, increase the dough strength and lengthen the dough’s shelf life (much like sourdough does). These acids are at the heart of artisan baking, and their development is primarily why it takes so long to make our products.

We primarily use two different types of commercial starters at the bakeshop and at home, and both are defined by how much they are hydrated. A
poolish
is a traditional French starter that is 100 percent water, and is named after the Polish, though no one can really explain why. Remember those strange bakers’ percentages and how they’re based on the percentage of flour? That 100 percent means that it has exactly the same amount of water as flour. This adds strength and flavor to the dough. We generally use a poolish in doughs that have a lower percentage of water in the final recipe, to encourage a large, open crumb.

A
biga
has Italian origins, so we use it in our ciabatta and other wetter doughs to add a bit more structure throughout the process. It typically is 60 percent water, making it a much stiffer starter than the sloppier poolish.

And, although we don’t use any in this book, a simple way of adding flavor to a dough is to use what we call
pate fermente
—literally, “fermented dough.” Just save a chunk of French or ciabatta dough from a mix in a bag in your fridge, and work it into any new dough you’re making within a week or so. Voilà, instant starter.

We’ve written a whole chapter on sourdough and how you can make a starter yourself, but the basic deal is that it’s a symbiotic mixture of wild yeast and bacteria, suspended in water and fed the starches in flour. See
Chapter 4
for all the details.

THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOL IN YOUR KITCHEN

Cooks have their knives, bakers have their hands. For the baker, there is no length of wood and steel between the product and the person during production. The list of things bakers do with their fingers is unending: They detect strengths and weaknesses, tiny defects in the dough and temperature; they tap the bottom of a loaf to determine doneness, catch things falling off the peel and on and on and on.

On my second or third shift at my first baking job, a seasoned baker asked, “How does the dough feel today?” I answered, “It feels a lot like dough to me.” I had no frame of reference for what was good or bad, tight or loose, warm or cold. That comes only with experience. Because the more you bake, the more you feel the dough with your hands and see the results that arise from any particular batch of dough, the more you will be able to recognize what proper mixes feel like. Even today, as we walk around the bakery we reach into bins to poke the contents, run our hands over proofing loaves and grab handfuls of not-yet-finished dough still in the big mixer. It informs us and reconnects us with the day’s work, and lets us keep tabs on the progress of the bread cycle.

Bake enough, and your dough will tell you exactly how it’s doing right when you lay your hands on it.

Here are the keys to the baking process that will result in great bread on a more consistent basis. At the bakery we call this the Cycle, and as an experienced baker, you will begin to see every dough in terms of where it is in its own Cycle. Knowing the life cycle of your bread will allow you to understand why it acts the way it does.

This is bakeshop-speak for weighing your ingredients. We rarely use volume measurements, because a dry ingredient’s weight will vary depending on how it’s packed into the cup. If you dig into a fresh bag of flour that’s been on the shelf for a while, it will have settled into a compact mass. It’s much more accurate to weigh everything in pounds and ounces (kilograms and grams), dry and wet alike; even liquids have varying densities that may affect how your dough behaves.

If you want to get your great bread off on the right foot, scale carefully, and without distraction! We put our mixing room in a little private corner of the bakery so our folks won’t get distracted, and our cooking school had an enforced rule:
Don’t talk to the mixer when he or she is scaling.

We have nothing against electric mixers. We use them all the time at the bakery. They’re big, heavy, cast-iron models that can mix a couple hundred pounds of dough at a time (and those are the small commercial bread mixers!) and, most important, are designed for the express purpose of mixing dough in bakeries like ours—establishments that push out way more dough than you ever will in your home kitchen.

But when we’re talking about making dough in 4-pound or 5-pound/1.5 or 2-kg batches, we use it as an opportunity to create bread using the most traditional method possible. There is no replacing the experience of starting your dough, the one that you will walk through its entire life cycle, with your own two hands. Feel the gluten develop between your fingers, push and knead until the liquid is absorbed, incorporate the yeast and salt with your fingers. It’s the joy of being a bread baker.

So that mixer you have on your counter should really be pushed aside when you’re thinking of making bread at home. You’ll need the counter space for folding, dividing and shaping your loaves.

1. Combine all your flours in a bowl (but no salt or instant yeast).

2. Put your water and starter (sourdough or otherwise) in a bowl large enough to mix your dough without it spilling over the side.

3. Add your flours to the water/starter mixture. Holding the side of the bowl in your nondominant hand, press your dominant hand into the middle of the mixture with an open palm. Squeeze your fist and turn your hand over. Repeat this action all along the edges of the bowl, turning the bowl in between each squeeze—the goal is not only to hydrate the dough completely, but also to incorporate the entire starter into the dough evenly.

4. When the dough starts to come together and build strength, start scooping the dough from the sides and into the middle of the dough and pushing down, turning the bowl the entire time. You want to bring the dough to a shaggy mass stage, where all the liquid is incorporated, but very little gluten has developed.

5. Let the shaggy mass rest for 30 minutes. This is what bakers call the autolyse—a period of resting when the barely developed gluten strands absorb the liquid in the mix, reducing the necessary amount of final mixing.

6. Sprinkle salt and dry yeast (if necessary) into the surface of the dough. Again gripping the bowl with your nondominant hand and continuously turning, grab the dough from the sides of the bowl and push toward the middle for about a minute, or until the yeast and salt are completely incorporated and the dough is a cohesive mass that you can pick up in one go, if you wanted to. At this point, if you have additions like nuts or fruit, add them and continue mixing to incorporate.

Cover the dough, and place it in the warmest spot in your kitchen.

When the dough is sitting in its bowl in that time between the mixing and the divide, we call that the bulk fermentation. That’s what’s going on: The yeast is eating the starches and sugars in the flour, producing carbon dioxide and inflating pockets in the gluten structure like a million tiny balloons inflating at once. If we’re using commercial yeast, we’ll generally go with a 2-hour fermentation period, due to the more predictable nature of the leavener. We’ll give almost every pure sourdough an extra hour of fermentation to give the homegrown microorganisms a bit longer to get a head of steam up. And while those yeasts chomp away at the starch and break down that gluten structure you’re starting to form, it’s important that you continue to build more dough strength. The best way to do that is using our 30-minute four-fold technique, which we use throughout this book.

This is really the crux of building good dough strength at home. Rather than kneading and kneading and kneading the dough at the mixing stage, it is more beneficial to most dough (and to most home bakers) to develop its strength over the course of the entire fermentation period. By giving the dough a series of timed folds interspersed by periods of rest, we can build a beautifully developed dough while monitoring its progress throughout the fermentation period. And it’s incredibly easy, it keeps you in touch with your dough as it moves along so that you can learn from it and it makes great bread. Here’s how it works:

1. Using your fingers or a bowl scraper, gently turn the dough out onto a floured counter.

2. Using the pads of your fingers (not the sharper tips), grasp the left side of the dough and bring it about two-thirds of the way across the rest of the dough. Brush away any excess flour that may have come from the table. Do the same for the right side.

3. Bring the bottom section up toward the middle and, finally, bring the top down. Roll the dough over so the seam is on the bottom, and place it back into the bowl. Return it to its warm spot.

4. Repeat this procedure every 30 minutes until the bulk fermentation is complete, according to your recipe.

That’s pretty much it. Can’t you just feel that gluten developing and fermentation chugging away right under your fingertips? That’s the stuff of life right there.

The rest of the dough’s life before shaping is fairly self-explanatory. Dividing your dough into the desired weights is your first interaction with your fully fermented dough. At this point it will be soft, warm and strong, starting its transformation into a loaf of bread. Most recipes call for a “bench rest,” which is transitional shape from sloppy cut piece to final shape. That shouldn’t take more than 20 or 30 minutes, and in some cases, like the Ciabatta, there is no bench rest at all. Each recipe’s instructions will tell you whether it’s necessary or not.

Finally, you’re on to shaping.

After the mix and the folds, the shape is the most important technique the home baker can learn to achieve bakery-style bread at home. There are myriad shapes to choose from, and bakers all over the world pride themselves in expertly crafting loaves that burst beautifully in the oven. We’re going to focus on four basic shapes, all of which can be applied to almost any recipe in the book. We give our suggestions for each loaf, but feel free to experiment.

Starting with one side of the divided piece, gently but firmly fold and roll the dough up while turning it to create a roundish shape. It’s more like you’re using your two hands to gather a seam together at the bottom. Using the table for grip, pull the dough back toward you, stretching the surface tight.

Fold the left and right bottom “corners” of the round on top of each other, creating a bell shape. From the bottom, roll up the dough, pulling back and stretching the surface as you go. When you get to the end, use your fingers to pinch the seam along the table you now have a cylinder shape. For a “stubbier” version, gather the sides in more as you shape. For a longer batard, roll the sides with your hands to taper the ends.