Once you have tried a few different bread recipes, you can start to realize that you can wing it, and if you are lazy like me — hardly able to muster up the energy to open a cookbook and certainly incapable of remembering which recipe you really like — this is a welcome revelation.
If you have flour, liquid, salt, and yeast, you will have bread. And if you have noticed the order you do things and how the dough looks as you've mixed it according to the directions, you can easily make it all happen without precise measurements.
Today I had some herbs that I had picked a while ago, and they were sort of wilting on the counter. A vision — or a taste– of cheesy herb-y bread floated in my brain — the kind of embellished sandwich bread that calls for, in addition to the basics, some form of fat and an egg.
For liquid, my stand-by — potato water in addition to regular old water.
{Potato does something incredible to bread. Keep the water from making mashed potatoes, cook up a potato, chopped in small pieces, in the microwave, and puree with your hand blender, or use a little potato starch. It just adds that little something to the texture and the flavor…}
For flour, I used some unbleached white and a lot of white whole wheat, and then I remembered a little container of leftover steel-cut oat porridge….
A quick zap with a little water and in it went!
Dissolve the yeast in about a cup and a half of warm water, add a tolerable amount of flour, make sure you use a goodly portion of salt (1 tablespoon for 7 cups of flour), and chuck in your extras to your heart's content.
As you mix (in the stand mixer), continue adding liquid (water, milk, buttermilk — once I used the liquid from baked beans! It was good!) until you get the mix you remember from all those times you used a recipe.
Only, make your dough a little looser than you think. The first two mistakes home bakers make are
1. Not enough salt.
2. Not enough liquid — because they want to be able to handle the dough, but actually, you shouldn't handle it much, and if you want a tender, moist bread you have to get a little sticky.
Don't forget the autolyse — just the thing for the distracted baker — an excuse to leave what you started for 20 minutes and go do something else…
The texture of the developing (fermenting) dough changes magically after this rest. You can see the gluten's development. What had been somewhat rough and resistant becomes docile and silky. A quick knead (I let the mixer do it, but not for long at all) and into the greased bowl it goes.
A long slow rise results in a better product than a hurried one in an overly-warm place. Yes, the dough will rise, but the chemical reaction is actually different. Your dough will be carbonated rather than fermented, and a yeasty (unpleasantly so) taste is the outcome.
The heavy kneading called for in most recipes is to trap the gas, whereas the leavening in the slowly risen bread is quite different, but here my memory fails me and I would have to look it up. You will note, however, the faint whiff of alcohol after the long rise, signaling the fermentation…
Bread made this way has an amazing taste — not flat, but rather dimensional; it also keeps well, not developing that off flavor hurried bread has the next day.
Now gently — GENTLY — turn and turn again for another rise. Then form into loaves. My mixer is the 6 quart one, so my 7-8 cups of flour usually yield three large loaves or in this case, four small ones and one medium one.
(The latter braided, of course!)
I like the little ones for this savory bread — then I can freeze it and have it handy to round out a simple supper.
As the oven nears its preheated temperature, slash the bread. I set the oven for 350* (I have convection), but when I put the bread in, I turned it up to 400* so that it would be heating rather than cooling.
See, the oven cycles on and off, and when the buzzer tells you it's preheated, that means it has gotten to its temperature and will now start to cool off until it sinks below the point that it triggers the thermostat — and for that great lift you want your loaves to have, the oven needs to be heating UP, not DOWN.
Set the timer for 15 minutes, then turn the heat back down to 350* for the final baking, in this case, just 10 minutes more (these were small loaves).
Is that not glorious? The braided loaf was glorious as well. The photo of it, less so — sorry!
A freshly baked loaf makes a pot of soup a good hearty meal. (If you have big appetites to feed, make sure you offer tortilla chips with guacamole, hummus, and a bowl of nuts as well. I meant to do that tonight, but what is spacier than a homeschooling mom on the second day of school, I ask you? Not much. We seem fine, however.)
A recipe for the soup, you say? Oh fie!
I give this concoction the appetizing name of refrigerator-cleaning soup — boil up a ham bone, take off the meat and put it back in, throw in all the little leftover veggies you have lurking about (corn, swiss chard, green beans — all chopped up in the food processor), add some potatoes and a little orzo, and voila! Not lovely. No. But! Delicious!
Serve it up on the Goodwill dishes (love those shallow bowls!), with cheese and butter on the side, and there you have it — a recipe-less mid-week supper!
Keri says
Love your bread tips. I enjoy making bread but it always seems to come out very tough. I knead by hand because I have an underpowered/cheap mixer, but I think I must knead it too long? Maybe I need an good mixer to make good bread. 🙂
Leila says
Hi Keri!Hmmm…tough…could be a couple of things. Alas, I cannot help you justify the Kitchenaid, since it's all doable by hand! However, start saving, because you need it for other things :)So when you make your bread by hand, mix your ingredients together the way you usually do, but don't mix vigorously. Try to get the ingredients combined with maybe a tad more liquid than you normally do (or rather, add a tad less flour than you normally do) — and then WALK AWAY before you feel like it's really "dough".Let it rest. 1/2 hour? even more.Now turn it onto a floured board and gently knead it (you might need to use your bench scraper at first to get it folded over and worked into something that isn't just so gooey you can't handle it. But it will be better if you don't add too much flour to it — try to pretend it's workable 🙂 –just until you feel that it has some life under your hands. Nothing bad will happen if you don't knead it a lot — IF you then let it rise slowly.The intense kneading benefits the dough if you are rising it quickly — the glutens need to be developed so that they can trap the gas.But in the slow knead, things are different. The glutens develop chemically, not through your physical action. The yeast grows and transforms into vague stuff I can't remember –not a science person! — that works much better than the CO2 you otherwise get.By slow, I mean instead of 1 1/2 hours, maybe more like 3 hours at least. On a hot day, you can put it in the fridge. On a cooler day, the counter is fine, but not a warm counter near the stove! Let's say you only have an hour today to devote to bread-baking. Get it mixed, rested, and in a covered bowl. Leave it in the fridge until tomorrow! Then take it out and let it warm up (you might need the warm corner for this if your house is as chilly as mine) — then gently deflate it, turning it on itself, and let it rise for about 2 hours on the counter.Then shape — gently! — let it rise (are you letting it rise enough this last time? If not, that can make it heavy and tough) and bake.Is it not more tender? Report back.If you find the "Spent Grain Bread" post (look under the bread category or search the blog) you will find a recommendation of a book — Artisan Bread Baking — that explains all of this better than I can….also, the link that the word "autolyse" in this post takes you to is a blog with lots of good discussions.Happy baking!
Pippajo says
Oh, I aspire to homemade, off-the-cuff breads and soups, but I'm just not there yet! I'm just starting to make (easier) things without recipes, but bread and soup are still beyond me. Maybe this will be the year it all clicks into place in my rusted out brain!Thanks, as always for the wonderful recipes and tips!
Carrie says
One day I will get over my fear of baking bread!
Kari says
I LOVE baking bread!I used a bread machine for a while, but there is something so much more satisfying (and it turns out MUCH better) about doing it by hand. Even my 2 year old helps me knead and pat the dough…mostly she steals little pinches and gets all flour-y.If you do your pre-rise (autolyse?) and stick it in a plastic bag in the fridge (all week) you can pinch off as much as you like, let it warm up to room temp, shape, and bake whenever you like. It's not quite as good as a loaf made "fresh" (especially near the end of the week it has a slightly browner color) but it is pretty convenient to just have bread dough sitting in the fridge for pitas or a loaf or muffins or rolls or whatever goes with your meal that day.Ask if I do this often….? No—but I should! (It's just still hard to let it warm to room temp, shape and bake in the hour I have between getting home from work and needing to eat. Someday I'll be home again!)Also, I live in NM where it is DRY so I always cover my bread bowl in greased plastic wrap. When I used to cover it in a tea towel (even in Oklahoma where it's a bit moister) it was always dry. So if you have dry bread, knead less, use less flour and cover it with Plastic to keep the moisture in the bread instead of in the air!Kari
Decadent Housewife says
LOL! "And equally random soup!" Just the best. Thanks for the smile.
Deirdre says
Just reading the description of that bread made my stomach rumble. Oh, your bread!…
Erika says
I bake bread all the time and that bit about turning the oven *up* when you are about to put the bread in–never thought of it on my own but it makes total sense! Sheer brilliance! 🙂
Anonymous says
Thank you Leila; your blog entries are always so inspiring.I really appreciate the time and effort you put into them. You're humour, talent and wisdom are very apparent. (The bread and soup look delicious. You're husband must think he's a very spoilt man.):) Thanks for sharing. From, Linda
Mrs. Pickles says
Awesome! You've prodded me to care more about my bread-making style.According to family legend, my Finnish great-grandmother never measured anything when she made bread — she would just throw stuff in a bowl and mix it together, and when it was ready to bake she would stick her hand in the (wood-burning!) oven to see if it was hot enough! Your post reminds me of her.*runs off to start mixing flour & water*
Rona's Home Pag says
I haven't become a bread maker yet. My husband and I keep going back and forth on whether it will save us money.But who can argue with the smell of fresh bread?
Rebekah Daphne says
After years of fearing yeast, I just discovered that I could indeed make bread, and make it well– ah, the joy! But I hadn't graduated to "freestyling it" till I read this post. You gave me the courage to play around with my recipe, so I did, and came out with a tender oatmeal-wheat loaf, a delightful change from the regular whole wheat. Thanks for the kick in the pants. I'm excited to see what else I can come up with. 😉